MSntUGGUSOMN 

SciENdANDSuPEitsnnoN 



ARTHUR M.LEWIS 




Qass_ 
Book_ 



2:JF 



1^ 



The Struggle 

Between Science and 

Superstition 



By 
ARTHUR M. LEWIS 



CHICAGO 

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 

1916 



1> 









JOHN F. HIGGINS 

PRINTER AND BINDER 



376-382 MONROE STREET 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



--^^ PEEFACE 

?ce 

^ ^ This little book is the seventh volume to 
make its appearance as the result of the lecture 
courses delivered at the Garrick theater during 
the last nine years. Its theme is taken from the 
course of sixteen lectures on the same subject 
delivered in the season of 1914-15. I trust that 
this modest narrative will meet with as gen- 
erous a reception as its half dozen predecessors. 
There is no lack of evidence that in this coun- 
try in the coming years there will be a keen 
and bitter struggle between the representatives 

'j of superstition and the champions of social 

progress. This little book is intended to serve 
as a weapon in the hands of the latter. 

My reason for writing it is, that most of the 
books covering this field, such as Draper's ''In- 
tellectual Development of Europe'' and 
White's ''History of the Warfare of Science 
with Theology," are expensive and therefore 

j almost inaccessible to the general public. In 

overcoming this difficulty and furnishing what 
I hope will be an introduction and inducement 

j to the study of the larger works, I hope to have 

j aided the cause which they so valiantly served. 

I have followed as far as possible the method 

3 



4 PREFACE 

of the story teller, hoping thereby to have ren- 
dered the book especially interesting. I have 
constantly kept in mind the idea of a book 
which one might give to another with the ob- 
ject of securing a new convert to the cause of 
intellectual liberty. 

I wish here to acknowledge my great indebt- 
edness to the authors named above, and also to 
Mclntyre's biography of Bruno, Professor 
Bury's '* History of Freedom of Thought," and 
especially to Karl von Gebler's splendid and 
scholarly work, *' Galileo and the Roman 
Curia. ' ' I regret the lack of space that makes 
impossible an acknowledgement to many other 
authors, in whose works I have delighted while 
preparing this book. My thanks are also due 
for many valuable suggestions to my good 
friend Charles H. Kerr, who has always un- 
flinchingly held that there is no hope of the 
emancipation of a proletariat the mind of 
which is cobwebbed with delusions. Last, and 
above all, I give cordial thanks to the Garrick 
audience, whose generous appreciation from 
year to year has made this and the preceding 
volumes possible. 

ARTHUR M. LEWIS. 

Chicago, October 2, 1915. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Chapter Page 

I The Antagonists 7 

II Struggles in Greece 28 

III Science in Alexandria , • 40 

IV Christians and Emperors 63 

V The Alexandria Tragedy 78 

VI Bruno, the Wanderer 88 

VII Bruno, the Martyr 112 

VIII Galileo to 1616 128 

IX Trial and Sentence 147 

X Recantation and After 172 

XI The Future 184 



The Struggle Between 
Science and Superstition 

CHAPTER I 

THE ANTAGONISTS 

BEFORE we consider the historic struggle 
between superstition and science we 
shall briefly consider the natures of these 
age-long adversaries. The introduction of 
the antagonists will follow, not the order of 
their importance, but the order of their appear- 
ance — the historical order. This preliminary 
analysis will enable the reader to avoid later 
misunderstandings as to the sense in which these 
names are used. Superstition will have a much 
wider scope than is given it in common usage. 
The casting of articles over the right shoulder, 
the abstention from meat on Fridays, and similar 
practices, will not be regarded as superstition, 
but as merely the buttons of its uniform. Super- 
stition will mean what is generally meant by 
the word religion, and from this point the 

7 



8 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

terms will be interchangeable. This opens a 
path to the consideration of the nature of re- 
ligion. 

There have been many attempts to establish 
a dividing line in the animal kingdom between 
man and his lower relatives. Such is the unity 
of the universe however, that all attempts at 
rigid divisions have failed, and the efforts to 
separate the human and the subhuman have met 
with small success. True, the whole structure of 
science follows the principles of division and 
classification, but these divisions are not so much 
realities of the cosmos, as devices to overcome 
the limitations of the human mind. 

The attempt to isolate man as the ** social ani- 
mal" collapsed with the discovery of the com- 
plex societies of bees and ants, and Aristotle's 
definition of man as a *' political animal" per- 
ished with it, though quite unjustly, as status in 
these insect societies is determined by conditions 
that are physiological rather than political. 
Romanes' great book on animal intelli- 
gence, and a great mass of similar research 
have destroyed the idea of man as the exclusively 
''thinking animal." The definition which seems 
to have best stood the test of further investiga- 
tion is the one which describes man as the ''reli- 
gious animal." 



THE ANTAGONISTS 9 

It is practically certain that among the crea- 
tures below man there is nothing that can be 
properly called religion. Many animals display 
fear, but while fear figures largely in religious 
phenomena, it does not constitute religion. 

We enter a region of great uncertainty when 
it is asserted that there are, or have been, tribes 
or races of men entirely without religion. This 
raises the large and greatly controverted 
question of the universality of religion. The 
dogmatism of the assertions on both sides of 
this question has been strangely at variance 
with the vagueness of the evidence. In this field 
it has proven that the truth is not easily reached. 
Missionaries living among savage tribes have 
helped to cloud the subject, by refusing to recog- 
nize as religion, anything which did not agree 
with their own beliefs. Says Professor Thomas : 
**For the most part the religious world is so 
occupied in hating and despising the beliefs 
of the heathen whose vast regions of the 
globe are painted black on missionary maps, 
that they have little time or capacity left to un- 
derstand them.'' Many not specially religious 
travelers have also erred through inability to 
see religion in anything short of the compari- 
tively highly developed theological ideas of the 
western world. A yet further source of error 



10 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

lies in failure to allow for the now well-known 
reluctance of the savage to parade his religious 
beliefs before strangers. 

For these and other reasons, Lang, Moffat, 
Azara, and even so great an authority as Sir 
John Lubbock, have been deceived into asserting 
the absence of religion where more painstaking 
investigation proved it to be present. The 
present trend of the evidence is, undoubtedly, in 
favor of the universality of religion. 

This tendency has been enthusiastically ac- 
cepted by religious apologists, who hastily in- 
terpreted it to mean the exemption of religion 
from the process of evolution. It is only a case 
of vain grasping at straws. In half a dozen dif- 
ferent sciences, the natural evolution of religion 
has been established beyond any possible refuta- 
tion. As the attitude of modern ethnologists is 
well typified in Professor William I. Thomas in 
his valuable ** Source Book for Social Origins, '^ 
it will be well worth the reader's while to ponder 
his cautious but illuminating summary of the 
case. Having, in common with Lester F. Ward, 
adopted the idea of Tylor, that the essential thing 
in religion is ''belief in the existence of spiritual 
beings, ' ' Thomas proceeds : 

''So far as I can judge from the immense mass 
of accessible evidence, we have to admit that 



THE ANTAGONISTS 11 

the belief in spiritual beings appears among all 
low races with whom we have attained to thor- 
oughly intimate acquaintance: whereas, the as- 
sertion of absence of such belief must apply 
either to ancient tribes, or to more or less im- 
perfectly described modern ones. The exact 
bearing of this state of things on the problem 
of the origin of religion may be thus briefly 
stated: Were it distinctly proved that non-re- 
ligious savages exist or have existed, these might 
be at least plausibly claimed as representatives 
of the condition of Man before he arrived at the 
religious stage of culture. It is not desirable, 
however, that this argument should be put for- 
ward, for the asserted existence of the non-re- 
ligious tribes in question rests, as we have seen, 
on evidence often mistaken and never conclu- 
sive. The argument for the natural evolution of 
religious ideas among mankind is not invalidated 
by the rejection of an ally too weak at present 
to give effectual help. Non-religious tribes may 
not exist in our day, but the fact bears no more 
decisively on the development of religion, than 
the impossibility of finding a modern English vil- 
lage without scissors or books or lucifer-matches 
bears on the fact that there was a time when no 
such things existed in the land.'' 



12 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

The apologists for religion have even contend- 
ed, with small success where free discussion was 
possible, that religion has been an unmixed bless- 
ing to the human race. On the other hand, not a 
few of the clearest thinkers of our age have held 
religion to have been, throughout its career, an 
unmitigated curse. Among the latter may be 
placed America's greatest sociologist Lester F. 
Ward. ''Whatever'' says Ward ''may be the 
benefits which supernatural beliefs have con- 
ferred and are to confer upon man in a future 
state of existence, they have not only conferred 
none upon him in the present state, but have 
demonstrably impeded his upward course 
throughout his entire career.'' 

One of the truths which modem research has 
thoroughly established is, the purely human 
origin of all the religions. The flimsy dogma of 
a divine revelation has taken sanctuary in the 
pulpit, and even there suffers an increasing lack 
of unanimity. The somber gods, who were sup- 
posed to have spoken to our remote ancestors, 
have proved to be nothing more than the an- 
thropomorphic shadows — the idealized self-pro- 
jections — of the men who were their makers. 
Their barbarous codes were the disguised decrees 
of primitive rulers who sought, through a higher 
sanction, to rivet their mandates the more firmly 



THE ANTAGONISTS 13 

on the minds of men. This critical development 
has placed science and religion on equal ground 
in at least one respect — their common origin as 
products of the human mind. Religion then, 
like science, must be prepared to sustain the in- 
tellectual test. Even now — and the future is 
likely to grow steadily more discouraging for 
religion — a balloting of those possessing an 
elementary knowledge of the two sides of the 
question, and fear of social consequences of a 
sincere vote being eliminated, would create con- 
sternation in the religious world. Indeed, Ward 
has suggested a method by which religion might 
vote away its validity, without requiring an ex- 
pression from its critics : 

**If a convention of all the religions on the 
globe were to be called, each sect being repre- 
sented by one delegate, and the question were 
to be voted upon in the case of each religion 
separately. Is this religion true? or. Is this re- 
ligion beneficial to man? the result would in- 
evitably be that only one affirmative vote would 
be cast in each case, and that would be the vote 
of the delegate of the particular religion upon 
which the vote was taken ; and, if the action of 
this convention with regard to the feasibility 
of preserving or abolishing religions could be 
conclusive, it would be found that all the reli- 



14 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

gions of the world would be overwhelmingly- 
voted down and abolished, and this by the action 
of avowed religionists alone." 

Religion and science being progeny of a com- 
mon parent, the struggle between them has the 
nature of a civil war. The conflict is about as 
old as written history; it has never been sus- 
pended, and it still retains its primitive persist- 
ence. A search for causes however, serves great- 
ly to discredit the modern tendency to worship 
at the shrine of reason. 

Reason has undoubtedly been the savior of the 
human race. The contemplation of man as he 
existed in the cave-period, has caused more than 
one biologist to wonder how, in the struggle for 
existence, he managed to survive. The cave-man 
was probably physically stronger than the man 
of today, but in this respect he hardly compared 
with the animals who were his enemies and com- 
petitors. He was devoid of all natural weapons ; 
they were armed with horns, tusks and claws, 
which made combat unequal He also lacked the 
powers of flight possessed by animals naturally 
unarmed. His one advantage lay in his com- 
paratively larger brain, which enabled him to 
invent artificial weapons superior to any fur- 
nished by nature The mistake lies in the easy 
assumption that, because the power to reason 



THE ANTAGONISTS 15 

has been overwhelmingly advantageous, the acts 
it led to could never have been other than bene- 
ficial. The rational faculty in man, while it has 
been in the main, and in the long run, of ines- 
timable service, has led him to the performance 
of untold disastrous acts such as no lower animal 
could be persuaded to imitate. An extreme ex- 
ample is suicide, an act of which all lower ani- 
mals are totally incapable. The instinctive acts 
of animals are always based on a long experience 
almost invariably acquired at tremendous cost. 
Rational man partially escaped this initial cost 
by reasoned schemes to circumvent the baleful 
elements of his environment, but in so doing he 
often made mistakes — ^usually because of wrong 
conclusions based on false premises — which pro- 
voked calamities which could never fall on the 
instinct-guided animals. 

Quite naturally, these tragic blunders were es- 
pecially frequent in pre-historic times, when the 
rational faculty was in the experimental stage. 
Their prolific source was man's inability to com- 
prehend the universe, due to the unfortunate 
combination of a very simple mental faculty and 
an extremely complex cosmos. Admitting for 
the moment the existence of the hypothetical 
creator, it would seem as though he created the 
universe with a special view to the confusion of 



16 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

his children. When we consider how many ap- 
parently insoluble mysteries the universe still 
holds for us, notwithstanding our immense 
scientific progress, it is little wonder that our an- 
cestors rarely reached the truth. Indeed they 
never seem to have done so, except in the few 
instances where appearance coincided with real- 
ity. For example: the only correct idea they 
had about the sun was that it was hot. Th^ 
thought the sun and moon to be about the same 
size, as any uninstructed child would, and for 
the same reason — ^they seem so. How could they 
know that the golden orb of day had sixty million 
times the bulk of the silver disk which lit their 
nights? They seemed the same short distance 
away, and what could tell them that a measuring 
wand that would reach the moon would have to 
be placed on end four hundred times before it 
would touch the sun ? 

The earth presented another series of deceptive 
appearances. If they required an image of sta- 
bility, they found it in the solid earth beneath 
their feet. There was nothing to suggest that 
it was spinning like a top, and that they were 
carried around on its surface at the rate of 
seventeen miles a minute — the speed of a rifle 
ball. They knew — if their eyes were to be trust- 
ed at all — that the earth was the center of a cir- 



THE ANTAGONISTS 17 



cuit performed by the sun. How should they 
know the exact opposite was the truth, and that 
they were being whirled around the sun at a 
speed of nineteen miles a second. What is there 
to indicate to the modern traveler, journeying 
from New York to Liverpool, across a surface ap- 
parently as level as a billiard table, that he is, 
in reality, scaling a mountain of water three 
hundred and fifty miles high? It was not any- 
thing suggesting itself to the senses, but a de- 
duction from the known motion of the stars, that 
led astronomers to undertake those wonderful 
researches which resulted in the discovery that 
we are being carried by: the sun, along with the 
whole solar family, toward the great star Vega 
at the rate of twelve miles a second. It is almost 
impossible, as anyone who has tried knows, to 
make an ignorant man believe or understand, 
that water in an atmospheric pressure pump is 
not drawn up from in front, but driven up from 
behind, and this because the reality is so dif- 
ferent from the appearance. 

And so it happened that man's primitive at- 
tempts to understand the universe invariably 
went astray, and he succeeded only in collecting 
a great mass of misinformation. These errors 
were rarely harmless, and some were probably so 
disastrous as to lead to the annihilation of tribes 



18 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

and races who held them. What increased the 
destructive power of these ancient mistakes 
almost inconceivably, was that they constituted 
the solemn teachings of deified ancestors, and 
were thus made sacred by the halo of religion. 

Among the most calamitous of man's early 
blunders was the idea which stood, and still 
stands, at the center of all religion ; belief in the 
existence of spiritual beings. In addition to hav- 
ing inspired an unremitting opposition to the 
progress of science, this malefic belief has direct- 
ly caused deaths which it would be no exaggera- 
tion to place in the millions. A comparatively 
recent example of what was once the regular 
order of things was referred to in the following 
telegram, which appeared in the **New York 
Tribune'' of April 13, 1880: 

''London, April 12th — The seven hundred 
men, boys, girls, priests, and foreigners sacri- 
ficed at Mandalay for the restoration of the 
king's health, were buried alive — ^not burned as 
previously stated — ^under the towers of the city 
walls. The deed was done to appease the evil 
spirits. ' ' 

The ''United States Economist," of four days 
later — April 17, in a protesting article, had the 
following to say: "The sacrifice of seven hun- 
dred persons, including men, boys, women, girls. 



THE ANTAGONISTS 19 

priests, and foreigners, at Mandalay, for the 
restoration of king Thebaw's health, is an out- 
rage and a blot on the civilization of the nine- 
teenth century. Had such a wholesale massacre 
occurred in the most remote and inaccessible 
regions of Africa, there might be an excuse 
alleged for non-interference on the part of civi- 
lized governments, but no such reason can be 
given in this instance. Burmah is one of the 
important kingdoms of the far East. Mandalay, 
the capital and residence of the monster king, is 
an accessible sea-port, in which reside consuls 
representing European and Asiatic powers. The 
intention of this pagan to offer such a horrible 
rite to appease his gods was known to the con- 
suls, and fear and consternation had seized upon 
his subjects and they were fleeing for their 
lives. ^' 

An outrage indeed in the twentieth century, 
but only because enlightened men no longer be- 
lieve in evil spirits which need to be appeased, 
but quite proper and thoroughly logical for peo- 
ple holding that belief. Says Tylor ' * Men do not 
stop short at the persuasion that death releases 
the soul to a free and active existence, but they 
quite logically proceed to assist nature by slay- 
ing men in order to liberate their souls for 
ghostly uses." Ximenez says of the Indians of 



20 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Vera Paz, '*When a lord was dying, they im- 
mediateiy killed as many slaves as he had, that 
they might precede him and prepare the house 
for their master." Garcilasso says that a dead 
Ynca's wives *' volunteered to be killed, and 
their number was often such that the officers 
were obliged to interfere, saying that enough 
had gone at present. ' ' 

The science of anthropology has proven that 
this pernicious belief in spirit gods, who were 
neither better nor worse than the Jehovah of the 
Old Testament, had its roots in nothing better 
than the inability of savages to understand the 
nature of their dreams or to comprehend the 
meaning of shadows, echos, or the reflections of 
themselves in pools of water. Yet these gropings 
after truth which resulted in religion, were 
really the science of those early days ; they were 
the first attempts to grasp the structure of the 
universe. If they failed it was not because they 
used an instrument different from that used by 
modern science. The weapon with which they 
attacked their problems was the mind, but for 
them the mind was in an untried, undeveloped 
state. They failed where modern science suc- 
ceeded, as a child is baffled by riddles which 
readily resolve for a grown man. The difference 
in achievement betwen the primitive thinkers, 



THE ANTAGONISTS 21 

who founded religion, and the modern thinkers, 
who established science, is a difference in the 
periods in which they worked. It is a matter of 
chronology. 

Therefore, when we are asked to choose be- 
tween science and religion, it is not a choice be- 
tween science and something entirely unrelated. 
It is a choice between the science of a painted 
savage and the science of a Darwin. 

It is difficult for those who have not informed 
themselves on the subject, to understand why 
religion, founded upon, and consisting chiefly of 
prehistoric illusions, should have persisted so 
many centuries, and still remains a great social 
power. The most important reason is its great 
age. While science is of yesterday, religion is 
almost as old as the human race. For tens of 
thousands of years, unrecorded in history, re- 
ligion held the field unchallenged. To say that 
during this period it was ''bred in the bone" is 
to speak figuratively. There is no organic process 
by which beliefs can be be made congenital. The 
doctrine of ''innate ideas'' has been eliminated 
from the thinking of the well-informed. True, 
almost the same result has been produced by a 
process known in sociology, as social heredity. 
According to this illuminating theory, ideas are 
carried from one generation to another by edu- 



22 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

cation, as physical qualities are transmitted by 
Weismann's germ-plasm. Every infant's mind 
begins as a clean page upon which anything may 
be written. To this day the first impression 
made is religious; usually the first lesson is a 
prayer. The child is helpless; where the evi- 
dence to the contrary is not known, the mind 
must accept whatever is offered to it. So the 
child is made to begin life, not only as its par- 
ents, but as its remote ancestors of the stone age 
began. For it the long centuries of gradual en- 
lightment count for nothing, and it must re-enact 
the long human tragedy in its own brief career. 
All who have fought their way out of the dark- 
ness are familiar with the stages of the struggle. 
We begin with our minds choked with lies 
rarely believed by those who teach them. As we 
approach our youth, if it be our good fortune to 
have preserved our intellectual curiosity, and 
read books not recommended by conventional 
teachers, we begin to discover the fraud which 
has been practised upon us. The best of our 
years are given to unlearning superstitions we 
should never have been taught, and after we 
have passed the zenith, and are approaching the 
western horizon, we begin to acquire the knowl- 
edge which should have been given to us freely 
in our receptive childhood as we sat in school. 



THE ANTAGONISTS 23 

By the time we have learned to really live, we are 
about ready to fall face foremost into the grave. 
Yet the stupid, tragic waste of life continues un- 
abated. Every new generation of children be- 
gins where every other generation began, and it 
never occurs to us that it might be better for 
our children to begin, not where we began, but 
where we leave off. Of course there is a reason 
for this perpetual mummery, and the reason is 
not far to seek. Of all the instruments which 
have effectually served the ruling class, in the 
oppression of the exploited mass, none have com- 
pared with religion. This alone has saved re- 
ligion from annihilation at the hands of science. 
At last the oppressed of the world are beginning 
to understand, what the more enlightened among 
them have long known, that whoever an- 
nounces himself a friend of social emancipation, 
and is at the same time a defender of some re- 
ligious cult, may be counted as a cipher in the 
struggle for freedom. 

The most important difference between re- 
ligion and science is, that while the primitive 
gropings of prehistoric men became fixed to the 
point of petrifaction as religion, science vigilant- 
ly maintains its fluid state. This is the difference 
which is responsible for their historic conflict, 
and so long as this difference exists there can 



24 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

never be any suspension of hostilities. As 
neither side can make concessions without ceas- 
ing to exist, the annihilation of one of the com- 
batants is the only alternative to a perpetual 
warfare. For many centuries the struggle was 
unequal, and it seemed as if science were des- 
tined to be strangled in its infancy. With the 
revival of Greek learning at the Renaissance, the 
tide of battle turned, since when science has 
never suffered a defeat, and religion has never 
won a victory. 

4 There has been no lack of well-meaning, but 
cloudy-minded people, seeking to achieve a rec- 
onciliation, but the fixity of religion, and the 
mobility of science, have made amalgamation im- 
possible. Science has many settled opinions, but 
they are settled only in proportion to the amount 
of evidence in their favor. No scientific gen- 
eralization is regarded as beyond challenge. All 
that is necessary to the overthrow, and conse- 
quent relinquishment, of the most widely ac- 
cepted scientific theory is the production of evi- 
dence sufficient to disprove it. Thousands of 
times, in every field, science has found it neces- 
sary to modify, and often to completely recast 
its position. If during some of these transitions 
there have been controversies conducted with 
unnecessary heat, it has usually been because 



THE ANTAGONISTS 25 

some gentleman has imported theological habits 
of mind into an intellectual atmosphere where 
they are alien and undesirable. Science has 
never demanded unwilling acquiesence in any 
of her doctrines, and while countless thousands 
have sneered at her conclusions, none have been 
burned at the stake or broken on the wheel. 

Science, as represented by her illustrious sons, 
has always held that truth needed no adventi- 
tious aids, believing with the wise Gamaliel, that 
an idea, if true, would successfully withstand all 
opposition, while if false, in the end nothing 
could save it. While this is a rather optimistic 
view of the constitution of the universe, it has 
given science a stainless record which is a strik- 
ing contrast to the bloody career of religion. As 
our brief narrative will show, when men were 
slain for opinions sake, the opinion of the slayer 
was always some hoary delusion. No modern 
writer has stated the case more eloquently than 
Robert Blatchford. The following vivid indict- 
ment is from the closing pages of *'Not Guilty." 

^*We cannot look back over that trampled and 
sanguinary field of history without a shudder; 
but we must look. It reaches back into the im- 
penetrable mists of time, it reaches forward to 
our own thresholds, which still are wet with 
blood and tears, and on every rood of it, in 



26 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

ghastly horror, are heaped the corpses of the 
men, and women, and children slain by the right- 
eous, in the name of God. Though the gods 
perished, though the vane of justice veered until 
right became wrong, and wrong right, yet the 
crimes continued, the horrible mistakes were re- 
peated; the holy, and the noble, and cultivated 
still cried for their brother's blood, still 
trampled the infants under their holy feet, still 
forced the maidens and the mothers to slavery 
and shame. 

^*Men and women, is it not true? 

''From fear of ghosts and devils, and for the 
glory of the gods of India, of Babylon, of Egypt, 
of Greece, of Rome, of France, of Spain, of 
England, were not millions tortured, and burnt, 
and whipped, and hanged, and crucified? 

''Witchcraft, and heresy, idolatry, sacrifice 
propitiation, divine vengeance; what seas of 
blood, what holocausts of crime, what long- 
drawn tragedies of agony and bloody sweat do 
these names not recall ? And they were all mis- 
takes ! They were all nightmares, born of ignor- 
ance and superstition ! We have awakened from 
those nightmares. Our gods no longer lust after 
human blood. We know that heresy is merely 
difference of education, that there never was 
a witch; we know that all those millions wept 



THE ANTAGONISTS 27 

and bled and died for nothing; that they were 
tortured, enslaved, degraded and murdered, by 
the holy, through ignorance, and fear, and super- 
stition.'' 



CHAPTER II 

STRUGGLES IN GREECE 

GREECE had the good fortune to escape 
the curse of a sacred book. This is why 
all European science traces its begin- 
ning to the Greeks. Like all other peoples they 
had their superstitious period, and during that 
period their myths were little better or worse 
than those of the North American Indian. Greek 
mythology is linked with the name of Homer, as 
the Hebrew mythology, preserved in the Old 
Testament, gathers about the name of Moses. 
All students of primitive thought are impressed 
by the striking similarity of the beliefs of wide- 
ly separated races. This however, has found 
a comparatively simple explanation; they were 
all confronted with the same natural phe- 
nomena, and the laws of thought were the same 
for all. The Christian who imagines that the 
marvels of Christian theology were peculiar to 
the Hebrews, displays a simplicity bordering on 
the pathetic. 

In the Homeric age the blue sky was the floor 
of heaven. There Zeus held his court, surround- 
ed by a goodly company of Gods, who with their 
wives and mistresses, indulged some very human 
passions, not a few of their acts belonging to the 

28 



STRUGGLES IN GREECE 29 

category of crime. The sons of Gods by human 
mothers were quite common. Says Draper: 
*^ Immaculate conceptions and celestial descents 
were so currently received in those days, that 
whoever had greatly distinguished himself in the 
affairs of men was thought to be of supernatural 
lineage." Divine progenitors by immaculate 
conception were not limited to the Jews and 
Greeks. Romulus, the mythical founder of 
Rome, resulted from a chance meeting of the 
God Mars with Rhea Sylvia, as she went with 
her pitcher for water to the spring. The Egypt- 
ians who adopted the platonic philosophy, sin- 
cerely and devoutly believed that Plato 's mother 
Perictione, owed her illustrious son to the influ- 
ences of the God Apollo. At a much later period, 
the conquering Alexander signed his orders and 
decrees ''King Alexander, the son of Jupiter 
Ammon. ' ' His mother, Olympias, who of course 
knew the facts, often jestingly said she ''wished 
Alexander would cease from incessantly embroil- 
ing her with Jupiter's wife.'' In Alexander's 
age the educated Greeks had ceased to believe 
in supernatural pedigrees, and his proclamations 
were made for the effect that they had on the 
common soldiers. Arrian, who wrote the his- 
tory of the Macedonian expedition, says: "I can- 
not condemn him for endeavoring to draw his 



30 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

subjects into the belief of his divine origin, nor 
can I be induced to think it any great crime, for 
it is very reasonable to imagine that he intended 
no more by it than merely to procure the greater 
authority among his soldiers. ' ' Greek mythology 
had miracles and marvels of many types, but 
fortunately they were not recorded in a sacred 
book to be perpetuated by a priesthood, and 
serve as fetters for the Greek mind. Says Hux- 
ley : ' ^ The dead hand of a book sets and stiffens, 
amidst texts and formulae, until it becomes a 
mere petrifaction, fit only for that function of 
stumbling block, which it so admirably per- 
forms.'' 

It must not be assumed that religion was com- 
pletely disregarded by the later Greeks. This 
was true of the educated classes only. It was 
part of the sagacity of Greek statesmen, that 
they clearly perceived the value of religion as a 
means of perpetuating the subject condition of 
the lower classes. Long after religion had been 
discarded by Greek orators, philosophers, and 
legislators, it was loudly applauded in public. 
In the conversations of the educated it was unan- 
imously held that, while religion had no func- 
tions for them, it was, and always would be, in- 
dispensable for the common people. This is so 
generally the attitude of our own time, that we 



STRUGGLES IN GREECE 31 

are surprised to find it in vogue at so remote a 
date, as it had been for centuries in Egypt. 
Education was very highly valued in Greece, but 
even among the sophists, who were the educa- 
tionalists of Greece, there was no idea of 
spreading knowledge among the masses. 

There were many reasons for the decay of the 
Greek national faith, though all may be massed 
under the general title — the growth of knowl- 
edge. A conspicuous factor was travel. Fixity of 
opinion is a notorious characteristic of all people 
rooted to one spot. In any intellectual advance, 
peasants are always the last to move. People 
living always in one place never come in contact 
with conflicting ideas, and eventually come to 
believe their own are invulnerable. Travel in 
other countries effectively destroys the illusion, 
and convinces the traveler that opinions and 
creeds are matters of geography. The pious 
Herodotus found that at the very time Greek 
social life was supposed to teem with the super- 
natural, human affairs were following their ordi- 
nary course along the banks of the Nile, and 
Eratosthenes discovered the legends of Odysseus 
were contradicted by the facts of geography. 

Thoughtful Greeks began to ask why the 
miracles of the Iliad had so completely ceased, 
and why the gods, once so often seen, had so 



32 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

utterly disappeared? They refused to accept 
different standards for different times, and gen- 
eral scepticism was the result. The Ionian Gods 
of Homer, and the Doric Gods of Hesiod, lost 
their hold on the educated Greek mind. 
w Greek scholars were destined to pay the pen- 
alty for their failure to educate the general pub- 
lic. To escape the wrath of the ignorant, they 
were obliged to pretend to believe things they 
found no longer credible. When they raised the 
veil of hypocrisy, they invariably suffered. The 
father of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, allowed his 
heretical opinions to appear in his plays ; he was 
condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy, 
and was saved only by his brother Aminias rais- 
ing the arm which had been mutilated in the 
battle of Salamis. \ Euripides, another dramatist, 
sought to escape^ the consequences of his own 
unbelief by the ignoble expedient of denouncing 
the heresies of his fellow-scholars. 

The difficulties of the philosophers were even 
more serious than those of the poets, probably 
because their attacks were more fundamental 
ajid were therefore more dangerous to the faith. 
(^ Forever famous among these was the courageous 
Anaxagoras. He was drawn from Asia Minor 
to Athens as ambitious provincial intellects are 
ever attracted to the national metropolis. He 



STEUGGLES IN GREECE 33 

lived in Athens thirty years, became famous for 
the severity of his mode of life, and earned the 
lasting admiration and friendship of the might- 
iest of all Greek statesmen — Pericles. He was 
a pre-eminent astronomer and mathematician, 
and he sought, with amazing diligence and in- 
sight, for natural explanations of celestial 
phenomena. His search finally caused him to 
fall foul of the worshippers of the sun-god 
ApoUo.LSays Professor William Wallace of Ox- 
ford: ''He removed the halo of deity from the 
sun, and profanely turned Apollo into a mass of 
blazing metal, larger than Peloponnesus.'' The 
Peninsula of the Peloponnesus had an average 
diameter of about a hundred miles, and to assert 
that the small disk in the sky had any such enor- 
mous proportions was ridiculous, as well as blas- 
phemous. It required all the eloquence and 
power of Pericles to save Anaxagoras from the 
clutches of his prosecutors, who had arrested him 
on the charge of contravening the established 
dogmas of religion. Even then he was heavily 
fined and obliged to flee from Athens. He went 
to Lampsacus, where he was received with honor, 
and where he spent the remainder of his life, i? 
^ Another victim of popular ignorance and re- 
ligious bigotry was Protagoras, the first of the 
Sophists.^ He was very successful teaching and 



34 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

lecturing in the principal cities. His criticism 
was that religious believers claimed to know 
thinga that were beyond the reach of the human 
mind, l^ He published a book entitled '*0n the 
Gods," which opened as follows: ** Concerning 
the gods, I cannot say that they exist nor yet 
that they do not exist. There are more reasons 
than one why we cannot know. There is the 
obscurity of the subject and there is the brevity 
of human life. ' 'u For these sage observations he 
was charged with blasphemy. He fled from 
Athens, and on his way to Sicily, was lost at sea. 
Copies of his book were collected and burned, J 
though the book for which Anaxagoras had bee'n 
fined was still displayed for sale on the Athenian 
book-stalls. 

The most celebrated case of Athenian persecu- 
tion is, of course, the martyrdom of Socrates, 
and it would be pleasant to be able to record him 
as a martyr for science's sake. Unfortunately 
that is impossible, as Socrates was far from being 
a champion of science. He regarded mathemat- 
ical studies and physical research as useless and 
misleading. It would be difficult to imagine a 
more unfortunate attitude, as these studies were 
the very sources of scientific development, and 
it was the successful prosecution of them 
which later made Alexandria the city of un- 



STRUGGLES IN GREECE 35 

rivalled learning, and the real progenitor of 
modern science. Thus Socrates rejected that 
interrogation of the outward, objective universe, 
which has proven to be the real avenue to truth, 
and he set up in its place that perennial pitfall 
of the classic philosophers, ' ^ The introspective 
analysis of the contents of consciousness.'' His 
resultant ethical philosophy was almost worth- 
less, and consisted chiefly in juggling with words 
and definitions. He added almost nothing to the 
rich store of Greek knowledge, and about the 
only elements in his teaching of real value were 
his insistence that unfounded assumptions should 
not be accepted as established knowledge, and 
that acceptance by a majority could not be ad- 
mitted as a warrant of truth. 

It must not be inferred from the unfortunate 
experiences of Anaxagoras, and Socrates, that 
Greece had any organized repression of freedom 
of opinion that could, in any way, be compared 
with the Inquisition of the Roman Church in the 
middle ages. There was nothing at all approach- 
ing the wholesale murder of that sinister insti- 
tution. Among the educated classes of Greece 
unbelievers were the rule rather than the excep- 
tion, yet there are only a few isolated cases of 
persecution for opinions sake, and even in these 
instances the differing views were almost cer- 



36 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

tainly not the real causes of the accusation. A 
searching inquiry clearly demonstrates that 
Socrates was brought to trial by the enemies he 
made in his career as an Athenian politician. 
He had shown sturdy opposition on various oc- 
casions to the schemes of powerful political lead- 
ers, and they awaited the opportunity for re- 
venge. The political parties of Athens were 
chiefly two, which represented respectively the 
aristocrats and the democrats. Socrates belonged 
to a middle party, the Moderates, who sought to 
pit the middle against both ends. The Moderates 
were really a wing of the Aristocrats, and 
Socrates was an aristocrat in all his inclinations 
and the sworn foe of Athenian democracy. In 
politics, as in philosophy, he was a reactionary. 
His party followed the now familiar policy of 
keeping the masses ignorant, and denying them 
the franchise for their lack of intelligence. 
Socrates had long held his obnoxious opinions, 
but it was not until he was seventy years old 
that they were challenged, and had the demo- 
cratic party not come into power at that time, 
he would almost certainly have remained undis- 
turbed. With their advent to power, the demo- 
crats unwisely decided to reach their opponents 
through Socrates, and teach them a lasting 



STRUGGLES IN GEEECE 37 

lesson, and two of Socrates' three accusers were 
its leading politicians. 

Socrates was charged with (1) denying the 
gods recognized by the state, and (2) introduc- 
ing instead of them strange divinities, and (3) 
corrupting the young. Xenophon, his faithful 
disciple, relates that specific instances were given 
in support of the last charge. Among these 
were: teaching his associates to despise the in- 
stitutions of the state; teaching the young to 
disobey their parents and guardians and to pre- 
fer his own authority to theirs; quoting mis- 
chievious passages from Homer and Hesiod to 
the prejudice of morality and democracy. It is 
almost certain that, had he adopted a pose of 
at least respectful deference, there being no dis- 
position to extreme severity, he would have been 
found not guilty by his large body of judges. 
To the great distress of his friends, he adopted 
an attitude of open defiance. Even then, of the 
large jury of 501 Athenians, selected to try his 
case, 220 are said to have voted for his acquittal. 
/A further dispay of contempt for consequences 
brought the death sentence by an increased ma- 
jority. The charges were unjust, the penalty 
was extreme, and the whole affair was an ugly 
blot on the reputation of Athens. As a warning 
J to his friends not to meddle with politics, it was 



38 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

a complete success. His chief disciples, includ- 
ing Plato, left Athens until the storm blew over, 
and when they returned, Plato made it clear that 
he had retired permanently from political life. 

Less celebrated, but contributing more bril- 
liantly to the growth of knowledge, was 
Xenophanes. As I have already briefly re- 
counted this in ''Evolution Social and Organic" 
I may be permitted to quote the following para- 
graph from its opening chapter: 
i/" Xenophanes, of Colophon, had ventilated ideas 
obnoxious to the priests. He had done for his 
age what Feuerbach did to the Nineteenth 
century — he had explained the origin of the gods 
by anthropomorphism. Said he: '*If oxen or 
lions had hands, and could paint with their 
hands and produce works of art as men do, 
horses would paint the forms of the gods like 
horses and oxen like oxen. Each would repre- 
sent them with bodies according to the form of 
each. So the Ethiopians make their gods black 
and snubnosed; the Thracians give theirs red 
hair and blue eyes. ' ' Had Xenophanes lived at 
Athens, where a religious revival had just taken 
place, he would have shared the fate which later 
overtook the impious Socrates. Luckily for 
Xenophanes, in the colony where he lived *'the 
gods were left to take care of themselves." 



STEUGGLES IN GREECE 39 

That Xenophanes conld travel from city to 
city expounding his theories, and denouncing 
Homer for relating stories of the gods which 
would have disgraced men, is evidence of the 
general freedom of opinion ^ which, with some 
exceptions, prevailed in Greece. But while 
tolerance was generally practiced by the Greeks, 
they did not realize its tremendous social value, 
and they did nothing to make it permanent. It 
was left for them to learn by bitter experience, 
at the hands of the Christians, in their wonderful 
city Alexandria, what a fearful curse is the com- 
plete abrogation of the freedom of thought. 



CHAPTER III I 

SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA I 

THE Satraps of the Persian empire ob- 
served that their hired Greek soldiers 
were far superior to the native troops. 
The Greek soldiers themselves were not blind 
to their own great prowess, and the stories they 
told on their visits home gradually created an 
impression that a Greek conquest of Persia, 
hitherto almost unthinkable, might be within the 
range of possibility. This notion came to ma- 
turity in the brain of Philip, the king of Mace- 
donia. As a result of the schemes and labors of 
twenty years, Philip had not only secured the 
recognition of Macedonia as a Greek province, 
but had made the rest of Greece subservient to 
it. Demosthenes had tried to check his progress 
by eloquent appeals to the Athenians, but his 
warnings had fallen on indifferent ears. Philip 
had triumphed because of his superior military 
organization; the Macedonian phalanx proved 
unconquerable until confronted by the Roman 
legion. Now he planned to clinch his supremacy 
by an enterprise which would arouse the en- 
thusiasm of all Greeks. He announced his inten- 
tion of avenging the old invasions of Greece by 
Xerxes and Darius, by leading the united Greek 

40 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 41 

armies to the conquest of Persia. Whether the 
military genius of Philip would have proved 
equal to the task can never be known ; while he 
was still shaping his plans he was assassinated 
by one of his own subjects in the year 336 B. C, 
sixty-three years after the death of Socrates. 

Greek hopes for the conquest of Persia did not 
die with Philip ; indeed it is quite probable that 
his demise was the best thing that could have 
happened for the success of his plans, for he was 
succeeded by a boy of twenty who, in five years 
from his father's death, had established a repu- 
tation for military genius, which is paralleled 
only in the history of the world by the fame of 

. Napoleon. In five years Alexander, with a com- 
paratively small but immensely capable Greek 
army, was complete master of the Persian Em- 
pire, with the emperor Darius a fugitive. 

In the decisive battle of Arbela, it is recorded, 
though probably with exaggeration, that fifty 
thousand Greeks defeated a million Persians. 
The three Persian capitals, Susa, Persepolis, and 
Babylon, immediately surrendered, and soon 
after, Darius suffered the fate which seems to 

. have been common to the monarchs of the period 
both Greek and Persian; he was assassinated. 
The debasing effects of war and conquest, com- 
bined with the almost inconceivable luxury and 



42 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

dissipation of the Orient, resulted in the com- 
mission by Alexander, in his later years, of a 
series of revolting crimes which gravely chal- 
lenge his surname — ^'The Great.'* 

It must be conceded, however, that his exploits 
brought benefits to modern Europe which were 
unequalled by any results of the careers of Han- 
nibal and Napoleon, even though we concede the 
latter to have done much toward the break-up of 
the feudal system. The chief credit for this 
must in large measure be laid to the circum- 
stance that in his youth he had for tutor, a great 
conqueror in the world of thought — Aristotle. 
His great teacher inspired him with a love of 
natural history, and the funds which enabled 
Aristotle to publish his great work on that sub- 
ject, were furnished by Alexander. It is quite 
probable that the desire to discover and collect 
new plants and animals, figured in the ambitions 
of the Macedonian campaign, but as the cam- 
paign proceeded this noble impulse was rapidly 
swallowed in an insatiable thirst for rapine and 
conquest. It was destined however, that soon 
after his death, one of the purest aims of his 
youth was to be brought to a magnificent realiza- 
tion. 

During his campaign, he founded several 
Alexandrias to perpetuate his name. The only 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 43 

one which really served that purpose was the 
one he set up on the Mediterranean coast of 
Egypt. When he lay dying in Babylon, follow- 
ing a drunken orgy, and he was asked by the 
generals who were gathered at his bedside, to 
whom he bequeathed his empire, he answered, 
^*To the strongest.'' As none proved strong 
enough, it feU to pieces, and his generals fought 
each other for the parts. Following a decisive 
battle at Ipsus in Phrygia, Syria and the East 
went to Seleucus — another king destined for 
assassination — Thrace to Lysimachus, Macedonia 
to Cassander, and — ^most important for our story 
and for later European civilization — Egypt to 
Ptolemy. 

Ptolemy was the most far-sighted of all 
Alexander's generals. The dynasty of which he 
was the first king, ruled Egypt 293 years, clos- 
ing with the death of the famous Cleopatra, the 
last of her line, in 30 B. C. when Egypt became 
a Roman province. The rule of the Ptolemies 
is the brightest chapter in the long history of 
Egypt, and is marked by the absence of discon- 
tent and revolt. Ptolemy I was known as 
Ptolemy Soter — ^the saviour — a surname given 
to him by the Rhodians for his preservation of 
them from their enemies. He maintained his 



44 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

palace at Alexandria, and made that city the 
capital of Egypt. 

Alexandria was in many respects, the most 
remarkable city of the ancient world. It was 
designed by the celebrated Greek architect 
Dinocrates, engaged by Alexander because of 
the great reputation he had acquired by the re- 
building of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The 
reading of a description of the city reminds one 
of some of the plans submitted to the various 
modern municipalities for the making of a city 
beautiful, except that no modern city would 
possess the artistic skill or the civic enterprise 
necessary to even approach the magnificence of 
the Ptolemaic capital. The city was buUt on a 
neck of land washed by the Mediterranean on the 
north and Lake Maroetis on the south. Its streets 
were laid out in straight parallel lines, the prin- 
cipal street being about three miles long and 
two hundred feet broad. This was intersected 
at right angles by a shorter street of the same 
breadth, making the figure of a cross. Along 
both these streets were houses, temples, and pub- 
lic buildings of almost indescribable magnifi- 
cence. In a two years' funeral journey the body 
of Alexander was brought from Babylon and 
buried in a splendid mausoleum at the intersec- 
tion of the two main streets. The city was 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 45 

divided into three sections: (1) the Jewish 
quarter on the northeast; (2) the Egyptian 
quarter on the west, which had been the site 
of the Egyptian village Rhacotis, and, (3) the 
Brucheum, which was the royal or Greek quarter 
and was the most magnificent part of the city. 

Alexander had a very high opinion of Jews as 
citizens and went to great trouble to bring large 
numbers of them from Palestine to Alexandria. 
This policy was continued by Ptolemy Soter, who 
brought a hundred thousand more after the siege 
of Jerusalem. The second Ptolemy, Ptolemy 
Philadelphus, redeemed from slavery a hundred 
and ninety-eight thousand, paying their Egypt- 
ian owners a just money equivalent for each. 
The Jews were treated in all respects as the 
equals of the Macedonians, which attracted 
thousands of Jews from Syria. Never before, 
or since probably, have the Jews been so con- 
siderately treated and they laid aside many of 
their national distinctions, and were proud to 
be known as Hellenistic Jews. 

The same wise and liberal policy was followed 
with the Egyptians. They were made to forget 
that they were a conquered race and that the 
Ptolemies were foreign kings. They were en- 
couraged in the holding of high civil offices and 
especial deference was shown to the ancient 



46 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Egyptian religion. They were allowed to bnild 
their temples in their own quarters, and the 
Temple of Serapis, known as the Serapion, was 
one of the most palatial structures in the city. 
On great religious days the reigning Ptolemy 
would make a spectacular visit to show homage 
to the Egyptian gods. Throughout the rest of 
Egypt the Egyptians were allowed all the form 
and pomp of royalty, while the real power was 
retained by the Macedonian king. The Greek 
quarter became the intellectual center of attrac- 
tion for all Greeks. Its unrestrained freedom of 
thought caused an immigration of Athenian 
philosophers and scientists which worked the 
ruin of Athens. 

The most remarkable single institution in 
Athens was its world-famous Museum. This in- 
stitution performed functions approximately 
similar to those of the modern university and is 
said to have housed at one time as many as four- 
teen thousand students. As a seat of learning 
it was without parallel in the ancient world. The 
most important element in its equipment was 
its enormous library. While much of the ma- 
terial for the library was collected by Ptolemy 
Soter, its establishment was made by his succes- 
sor, Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was perhaps the 
most marked example of the love of learning 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 47 

which seems to have run hereditarily through 
the entire dynasty. Demetrius Phalareus, con- 
sidered the most learned man of the age, brought 
specially from Athens where he had been gov- 
ernor for many years, for the task, was instructed 
to collect all the writings in the world, and car- 
ried out his orders with great diligence and 
without regard to cost. A large body of tran- 
scribers was constantly maintained in the 
Museum to make correct copies of such works as 
their owners refused to sell. Any book brought 
into Egypt by foreigners was at once taken to 
the Museum and a correct copy made, which was 
given to the owner while the original was placed 
in the library. In most cases considerable sums 
of money were paid as indemnity. Draper says 
that Ptolemy Euergetes, having obtained from 
Athens the works of Euripides, Sophocles, and 
Aeschylus, sent their transcripts together with 
about $15,000 as payment for the originals. 
When works were translated as well as tran- 
scribed, enormous sums were involved. On the 
recomm^endation of Demetrius the famous trans- 
lation of the bible, known as the Septuagint, was 
made. This was done at an almost inconceivable 
expense, and the translation had no rival until 
centuries later, when Jerome completed his Latin 
translation known as the Vulgate. The library 



48 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

in the Museum increased rapidly until it is said 
to have contained four hundred thousand 
volumes. 

The Museum was built in the Brucheum where 
it bordered on the Egyptian quarter. Close to 
it across the border was the Serapion and it was 
decided, probably for lack of space and other 
reasons, to form a second library, known as the 
daughter library, in the Serapion. The daugh- 
ter library increased until it contained three 
hundred thousand volumes. The two libraries 
had on their shelves practically all the books 
then known. These libraries were to serve one 
of the three principal objects of the Museum — 
the perpetuation of knowedge. Another object 
was the increase of knowledge, and for this there 
was connected with the Museum, botanical and 
zoological gardens, containing plants and ani- 
mals gathered from all parts of the world. There 
was also an astronomical observatory, containing 
spheres, globes, armils, astrolabes, and all instru- 
ments then known. For the measuring of time, 
they had the water-clock of Ctesibius. A very 
important department was the medical and 
anatomical, which carried on dissection for the 
increase of knowledge of the human body. 

The third aim of the Museum was the diffu- 
sion of knowledge. This was accomplished 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDEIA 49 

chiefly by lectures, discussions, and conversa- 
tions carried on for the instruction of the im- 
mense body of students which had flocked there 
from all the leading countries of the world. It 
is not surprising that such an institution pro- 
duced the greatest scientists and scholars re- 
corded in the history of the times. Mathema- 
ticians, physicists, and astronomers, whose 
genius has never been surpassed, and whose 
names will never be forgotten, created what is 
known as the Alexandrian school. These men 
and their labors constitute the real birth of 
science. It was the first great attempt of the 
organization of human knowledge. 

Before the labors of the Alexandrian astrono- 
mers, all that was known of the science was to be 
found in the writings of Aristotle, who had col- 
lected the current ideas of his time on this, as 
on many other subjects. As we shall see pres- 
ently, it was the curse of the latter middle ages 
that the fragmentary knowledge of Aristotle 
was regarded by the Christian Church as the 
final revelation of all that should or could be 
known about the universe. This was entirely 
contrary to the spirit of the peripatetic philoso- 
pher, who fully realized and explained the tenta- 
tive character of his own conclusions. Aristotle 
was called the peripatetic philosopher from his 



50 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

habit of walking while addressing his pupils. He 
especially warned his readers not to accept his 
explanation of planatary motion but to compare 
that with their own ideas and what they had 
learned from others. 

Aristotle was especially to be received with 
caution on astronomical subjects, as he himself 
was not an astronomer. He believed, in common 
with all Greek writers on this science, that the 
world was round, and this sound opinion was 
based probably not so much on observation and 
evidence as upon the Aristotelian idea that the 
circle was the perfect form. The Pythagoreans 
had accomplished a little in astronomy and the 
Greeks had inherited something from the Baby- 
lonian and Chaldean astronomers as a result of 
the Macedonian campaign. The scientific men 
who accompanied Alexander obtained from the 
Babylonian astronomers a series of observations 
of the eclipses of the moon covering a period of 
1903 years. While the Babylonians were dili- 
gent observers, they accomplished next to noth- 
ing in astronomical theory and it was left for 
Alexandria to produce the first really great as- 
tronomers. 

The first of these was Aristarchus who must 
be accounted one of the great astronomers of all 
time. Contrary to the established opinion of his 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 51 

period, he believed that the earth moved in an 
orbit around the sun, a clear anticipation of 
Copernican astronomy. At the first glance it 
seems to be a great misfortune that Aristarchus 
failed to convince contemporary or later Greek 
astronomers. If this conception of the solar sys- 
tem could have been embodied a few hundred 
years later in the Almagest of Ptolemy, it might 
have prevented the great war between science and 
the church, waged around Galileo over the Co- 
pernican theory. On second thought, however, the 
mistake of the church in accepting the earth as 
the center of the universe has probably done 
more to emancipate the modern world from 
church authority than any single fact in its en- 
tire career. One of the books written by Arist- 
archus, which is still extent, is entitled ^ ' On the 
Magnitudes and Distances of the Sun and 
Moon." In this work he uses an ingenious 
method for ascertaining the comparative dis- 
tances of the sun and the moon from the earth. 
His method was based on observing the moon at 
quadrature. Aristarchus knew the moon to be 
illumined by the light of the sun and that, there- 
fore, when the moon was half full, it must be at 
right angles with the earth and the sun. The 
triangle formed by the three bodies would there- 
fore be a right angled triangle. A calculation 



52 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

well known in geometry would then yield the 
distance from the earth to the sun expressed in 
terms of the distance from the earth to the moon. 
By this method he arrived at the conclusion that 
tjie sun was from eighteen to twenty times the 
distance of the moon from the earth. The error 
is enormous, as we know now, and the actual 
distance of the sun from the earth is four hun- 
dred times that of the moon. It is amazing, how- 
ever, that Aristarchus at his period should have 
even conceived such a method of measurement. 
The source of his error is easily understood. 
Even in our day, with our wonderful astronomi- 
cal instruments, it is quite impossible to de- 
termine by the method of Aristarchus, when the 
moon is at quadrature, because it is impossible 
to tell by direct observation of the moon when it 
is half full. The moon being covered with ele- 
vations and depressions, the boundary line be- 
tween the light and dark part of it, known as 
the terminator, is a very irregular line, and it is 
almost as difficult for us as it was for Aristarchus 
to know when this line is across the center of 
the moon. This determination being impossible 
to us, with our instruments, must have presented 
tremendous difficuties to Aristarchus, working 
with the crude apparatus of his time. 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 53 

Belonging to the same period was Apollonius 
of Perga, who labored in Alexandria and came 
to be known as the great geometer. He devel- 
oped the theory of conic sections and introduced 
the idea of epicycles to explain the apparent 
motion of the planets. The greatest of all the 
Alexandrian geometers, however, was Euclid, 
who opened a geometrical school in Alexandria 
about 300 B. C. His famous propositions in 
geometry have given him a reputation as dura- 
ble as the science itself, and notwithstanding 
some criticism which has been passed upon them 
by recent geometers, they still maintain their 
ground as models of accuracy and perspicuity, 
and standards of exact demonstration. They 
were employed universally by the Greeks and 
were subsequently translated and preserved by 
the Arabs, and are still taught in our schools. 

Perhaps even greater in mathematics than 
Euclid was Archimedes, the most inventive 
genius of antiquity. He was a native of Syra- 
cuse and spent almost aU of his life there. He 
is included in the Alexandrian school of scien- 
tists because he want to Alexandria in his youth 
and completed his education in the museum un- 
der the Alexandrian mathematician and geome- 
ter Conon. This was about half a century after 
Euclid. He then returned to his native city and 



54 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

immediately proceeded to make practical appli- 
cation of his knowledge and succeeded in estab- 
lishing the science of engineering upon a mathe- 
matical basis. He was the devoted friend, and 
some say a relative of Hiero, the King of Syra- 
cuse. The famous Archimedian screw was in- 
vented to raise water from the hold of one of 
Hiero 's ships. When Syracuse was besieged by 
the Romans, Hiero depended chiefly upon the in- 
genuity of Archimedes to hold them at bay. This 
he succeeded in doing by various contrivances, 
which prolonged the siege for three years. Some 
of the stories told of these devices are probably 
false or greatly exaggerated. Among these is 
the story of the burning mirror with which he 
is said to have thrown the heat of the sun upon 
the Roman ships, setting them on fire when they 
were within a bow shot of the city wall. This 
story is not now accepted because it is not men- 
tioned by either Polybius, Livy or Plutarch. 
The French scientist Buffon, however, demon- 
strated that something of this kind could be ac- 
complished. Probably the truth is that Archi- 
medes did invent a burning mirror but that he 
did not set fire to the Roman ships. He invented 
a number of engines of war, one of which is said 
to have reached over the city wall, seized the 
Roman ships, lifted them high in the air and 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDEIA 55 

then suddenly dropped them back into the sea. 
While he probably had devices which greatly 
damaged the Roman fleet, this enormous claw 
may be regarded as a myth. It may be said to 
the credit of the Roman general Marcellus, who 
conquered the city, that he gave strict orders 
to his soldiers that no harm should come to 
Archimedes. This disposition of the Roman gen- 
eral to honor brave and effective foes, which 
still persists in our day in the custom of allow- 
ing conspicuously brave enemies to keep their 
swords, was a departure from the policy of Alex- 
ander, who usually visited especial punishment 
on those who had succeeded in frustrating his 
plans. It is recorded, however, that when the 
soldiers entered Syracuse, one of them found 
Archimedes absorbed, to complete forgetfulness 
of the battle, in drawing a geometrical figure 
on the sand. The soldier, not having the least 
idea who he was, killed him. Marcellus lamented 
his death, gave him honorable burial and be- 
friended his surviving relatives. In fulfillment 
of his own request, his tombstone was marked 
with the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylin- 
der. When Cicero was in Sicily, more than a 
hundred years later, he discovered the tomb of 
Archimedes overgrown with thorns and briars 



56 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

and considered himself extremely fortunate in 
being able to rescue it from oblivion. 

"We return to the Alexandrian astronomers 
with the name of Hipparchus, who earned 
the reputation of being the greatest observ- 
ing astronomer of the ancients. Competent 
critics have agreed that, notwithstanding the 
remarkable insight of Aristarchus, Hippar- 
chus must be reckoned the greatest of the 
ancient astronomers. Unfortunately only one 
of his many books has been preserved. There 
is no proof that he belonged to Alexandria, 
though it is quite probable that he visited 
it and made observations there and his work is 
so associated with that of the Alexandrian as- 
tronomers that there is some justice in his in- 
clusion in that school. He made more extensive 
observations than any other astronomer of his 
time, and made systematic use of old observa- 
tions comparing them with later ones to dis- 
cover astronomical changes which could not be 
detected within a single lifetime. 

By comparing one of his own observations af 
the summer solstice with a similar one made by 
Aristarchus fourteen years before, he found that 
the anciently received value of 3651^ days was 
too great by seven minutes. This calculation 
by Hipparchus is within twelve seconds of the 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 57 

truth. By very careful observation of the sol- 
stices and equinoxes, he discovered that the year 
is not divided by these into four equal parts. 
The sun required 94^^ days to pass from the 
vernal equinox to the summer solstice while it 
took only 92^/^ to make the journey from the 
summer solstice to the autumnal equinox. This 
observation led Hipparchus to the great discov- 
ery of the eccentricity of the solar orbit; as we 
know now, of course, it really indicated the 
eccentricity of the earth's orbit around the sun. 
He was the first to construct astronomical tables, 
which have played so important a part in the 
history of astronomy. These were his tables of 
the sun. His observations of the moon led him 
to one of the finest theoretical deductions of 
lunar astronomy, known as the acceleration of 
the mean lunar motion. This discovery furnished 
Newton with one of the most delicate tests of his 
gravitation theory. Hipparchus also discovered 
the eccentricity of the lunar orbit and its incli- 
nation to the plane of the ecliptic. 

The appearance of a new star induced him to 
direct his attention for the present from the sun 
and moon to the stars. By very arduous and 
protracted labor he made a star catalogue of the 
principal stars visible above his horizon, fixing 
the relative positions and configurations of 1080 



58 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

stars. This led him to one of the greatest of all 
his discoveries, the shifting of the vernal 
equinox, indicating the precession of the equi- 
noxes. By comparing his observations with 
those of Aristillus and Timocharis, of fifteen 
years before, he discovered that the vernal equi- 
nox had advanced two degrees, which he cal- 
culated to be a rate of forty-eight seconds a year. 
This is astonishingly near the truth, as a rate of 
fifty seconds and a fraction is now established. 
Most people who buy a planisphere at the sta- 
tioners for the purpose of star gazing, would be 
surprised to learn that this method was invented 
by Hipparchus over two thousand years ago. 
Geography is also indebted to him for the happy 
method of fixing the places on the earth by lati- 
tude and longitude. 

Before passing to the last of the great Greek 
astronomers, we will return to the period of 
Euclid and note the labors of the Alexandrian 
geographer, Eratosthenes. The most celebrated 
of his important labors was an effort to deter- 
mine the size of the earth. It was known that 
Syene, the most southern city of ancient Egypt, 
was situated exactly on the equator, and at the 
summer solstice the gnomon cast no shadow, and 
the rays of the sun illumined the bottom of a 
deep well in that city. On the same day, E rates- 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 59 

thenes calculated that the meridional distance 
of the sun from the zenith at Alexandria was 
about seven degrees, or a one-fiftieth part of the 
circumference of the meridional circle. The dis- 
tance from Syene to Alexandria was measured 
to be 5000 stadia. Eratosthenes multiplied this 
by fifty, calculating the circumference to be 250,- 
000 stadia. Unfortunately we have no means 
of knowing the length of the Greek stadia, so 
that we cannot tell the correctness or incorrect- 
ness of this rough but ingenious calculation. 

After the death of Hipparchus, Greek astron- 
omy and Greek science suffered a relapse. Many 
writers have attempted to discover the reasons, 
and various explanations have been offered. 
Probably the most acceptable is one which 
ascribes the intellectual decline of Alexandria 
to the successful rivalry of Rome, which grad- 
ually became the intellectual center of the then 
known world. Freedom of opinion, however, was 
preserved in the capital of Egypt and some scat- 
tering observations of the stars and an occasional 
work on mathematics showed that the scientific 
spirit had not disappeared and about 130 A. D. 
the last and one of the most illustrious of the 
Greek astronomers appeared in Alexandria. 
This was the famous Ptolemy. He was not re- 
lated to the kings of the Ptolemy dynasty, al- 



60 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

though some writers have so asserted. The 
name Ptolemy was quite common in Egypt. His 
greatest service to the science of astronomy was 
the collection of the knowledge of his time into 
his great work of thirteen books, known as the 
Almagest. This work was the Bible of astron- 
omy down to the days of Copernicus and for 
many centuries Ptolemy was described as the 
"Prince of the Astronomers." Recent investi- 
gation however, proves that as an astronomer 
Ptolemy was considerably inferior to Hippar- 
chus. The work of Hipparchus is really the 
basis of the Almagest. Delambre, the French 
historian of astronomy writes of Hipparchus, as 
follows : 

"When we consider all that Hipparchus in- 
vented or perfected, and reflect upon the num- 
ber of his works and the mass of calculations 
which they imply, we must regard him as one 
of the most astonishing men of antiquity, and 
as the greatest of all in the sciences which are 
not purely speculative and which require a com- 
bination of geometrical knowledge with a knowl- 
edge of phenomena, to be observed only by dili- 
gent attention and refined instruments." 

The same authority says of Ptolemy that after 
a laborious and minute examination of the 
Almagest, he doubts whether anything is con- 



SCIENCE IN ALEXANDRIA 61 

tained in the great work, beyond the author's 
own statement, from which it can be decisively 
inferred that Ptolemy ever observed at all. His 
own catalogue of stars contained only 1022, be- 
ing 58 below the catalogue of Hipparchus. His 
determination of the positions of the stars gives 
every evidence of being obtained, not by his own 
observations, but by calculation of changes from 
the time of Hipparchus. 

Delambre justly remarks that if any modern 
astronomer were to adopt a similar course, he 
would immediately forfeit all claims to confi- 
dence. But Ptolemy stands alone having no 
contemporary astronomers or writers to judge 
his methods. His principal astronomical dis- 
covery was that of the evection of the moon, but 
the socalled Ptolemaic system of the universe 
is in reality the system of Hipparchus. 

Even after its decline, the scientific reputation 
of Alexandria was so great in the days of Julius 
Caesar that when the Roman calendar of the 
period had caused confusion by its errors, Caesar 
brought from Alexandria the astronomer Sosig- 
enes. By his advice the lunar year was abol- 
ished and the civil year was regulated entirely 
by the sun and the Julian calendar introduced. 

Alexandria and its science have been dealt 
with at some length here to give the basis for 



62 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

a just estimate of the merits of the struggle 
between Alexandrian science and the Christian 
religion which led to pitched battles on the 
streets of the city. Before that story can be re- 
lated in its proper setting, we shall be obliged 
to observe the rise of Christianity in the Roman 
Empire. 



CHAPTER IV 

CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 

AS all students of the period have observed, 
the trinmph of the Roman legions over 
the armies of Greece, was followed by 
the victory of Greek learning in the minds of 
Roman scholars. From this pupilary relation 
Roman thought never emerged, for by the time 
it was essajdng to stand upon its own feet, the 
Christian religion supervened and arrested the 
intellectual development of Europe for more 
than a thousand years. 

There was one conspicuous element in Roman 
public policy which can hardly be said to be 
copied from the Greeks, as it was quite common 
among the ancient nations. This was the practi- 
cal unanimity of the educated classes in the 
opinion that, while the miracles and vagaries of 
religion were incredible to them, they must be 
accorded a pretended reverence to avoid the in- 
tellectual awakening, and the consequent discon- 
tent of the subject masses. Many earnestly reli- 
gious students have emerged from their studies 
with the clear conviction that this always has 
been, and will always remain, the chief function 
of religion, this is why the study of history ranks 

63 



64 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

with the cultivation of science, as a force making 
for social progress. 

We have here also, the real explanation of the 
insecurity of ancient knowledge and freedom of 
opinion. In the carefully preserved ignorance 
of the masses, the educated rulers found, in 
times of crises, they had raised a specter they 
could not lay — they had nursed a beast which 
turned to devour them. In our own time hope of 
escape from a recrudescence of decadent Chris- 
tian dogmas, or the disastrous triumph of such 
superstitious and reactionary cults as the half 
mis-named Christian science, lies in the thor- 
ough democratization of scientific knowledge. 

There is no lack of evidence of the general 
emancipation from the superstitions in the Em- 
pire, enjoyed by the rulers and scholars of Rome. 
Cicero tells the story of a consul of the Claudian 
gens, who when about to engage in the first 
Punic war, openly flouted the sacred auspices. 
"When the sacred poultry were let out of the 
coop, to indicate, if they should drop a grain 
from the bill, the success of his undertak- 
ing, they refused to eat. Claudius, disgusted 
with the mummery of a performance he did not 
believe in, caused them to be thrown in the 
water, saying that they might drink if they 
would not eat. For this irreverence, although 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 65 

this form of diviniation was then falling into 
disuse, he was condemned by the people. His 
colleague Junius also ignored the auspices, and 
there-by fell into such deep disfavor that he com- 
mitted suicide. Cato, a rigid observer of all 
Roman ceremonies, said that the haruspices — 
the Etruscan name for the auspices — might well 
laugh in each others faces. Julius Caesar, in 
whom, says Robertson, '*we see the Roman brain 
at its strongest," expressed repeatedly his con- 
tempt for the auspices and avowed his disbelief 
in the popular doctrine of immortality. He 
came off better than Claudius and Junius be- 
cause of his greater power, and also probably be- 
cause he won his battles while they lost theirs. 
Even Dean Merivale admits that Caesar *' pro- 
fessed without reserve the principles of the un- 
believers.'' And Julius Caesar was thoroughly 
typical of the men of action of the Roman world. 
The hypocritical program of ruling the people 
by clouding their minds with discredited super- 
stitions met with great difficulties in Rome. The 
Roman generals brought home from their war- 
like expeditions, hordes of prisoners of war, and 
each new horde brought with it a new religion. 
The Roman policy required that each new reli- 
gion be placed on an equal footing with the old 
ones. This involved the necessity of the widest 



66 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

possible toleration between the adherents of the 
various faiths. It was precisely at this point 
that Christianity impinged upon the religions 
serenity of the Eoman Empire. 

Lucretius, the most brilliant of all the Roman 
poets and scholars, wrote his world masterpiece, 
*' On the Nature of the World'' in which he gives 
the highest achievements of ancient science, to 
the utter rout of religion; Juvenal wrote his 
keen satires ; Lucian devoted a genius of the first 
magnitude to lampooning the gods; but what- 
ever objections the Roman government might 
have to such proceedings were purely political. 
They were not impious blasphemies, but a men- 
ace to the stability of society, because they dis- 
turbed its religious foundations. The so-called 
crime of heresy was unknown in pre-christian 
Rome. Renan says : ^ ' We may search in vain the 
whole Roman law before Constantine for a single 
passage against freedom of thought, and the his- 
tory of imperial government furnishes no in- 
stance of a prosecution for entertaining an ab- 
stract doctrine.' ' It did not occur to the Romans 
that the gods needed human defenders; their 
attitude was expressed in the saying of the Em- 
peror Tiberius: ''If the gods are insulted, let 
them see to it themselves." 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 67 

In their first acquaintance with the Christians, 
the Romans regarded them as a sect of the Jews. 
The Jews were in disfavor with the Romans be- 
cause they refused to concur in the Roman policy 
of friendly tolerance of every religion for every 
other religion. With the Jew, as later with the 
Christian, his own religion was true, and every 
other religion was an abominable idolatry. While 
the Romans made some unjustifiable attacks on 
the Jews, Robertson says : ^ ' It was the constant 
policy of the Emperors to let them alone and to 
protect them against the hatred which their own 
fanaticism aroused.'' This policy worked well, 
but presently the Romans observed, to their dis- 
may, that certain of the Jews were proselitizing, 
a practice which fiew in the face of all Roman 
precedent. Rome expected every worshipper to 
keep to his own religion, and leave every other 
worshipper to the undisturbed enjoyment of the 
same privilege. When they discovered that 
the Jews who were seeking to make converts 
among the Romans were not judaists, but Chris- 
tians, their anger was turned on the Christian 
faith. When the Romans who became Christians, 
began to follow the same evil example of vilify- 
ing eyevy other faith in the interest of their 
own, the governing Romans saw the whole social 
fabric threatened with disintegration. Then it 



68 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

was that the persecution of the Christians was 
begun. The persecution of the Christians by the 
Romans was, beyond all question due, not to 
Roman intolerance of Christianity, but to Chris- 
tian intolerance of the religions which had been 
guaranteed protection by the tolerant Romans. 
Any one who reaches any other conclusion is 
guilty of a strange mis-reading of Roman his- 
tory. Notwithstanding this provocation, the 
Emperor Trajan issued an edict decreeing that 
Christians were not to be sought out, that an- 
onymous charges were not to be noticed, and 
that an informer who failed to establish his 
charge should be liable to be punished under 
the laws against calunmy. All of which was in 
striking contrast to the later procedure of the 
Christian inquisition. The Christians them- 
selves recognized that the edict of Trajan pro- 
tected them, and that their persecution pro- 
ceeded from the populace rather than the au- 
thorities. While there was great laxity of appli- 
cation, the law was severe; the Christian re- 
ligion was outlawed, and to be found to be a 
Christian was punishable with death. 

The Romans could not understand the refusal 
of the Roman Christians to join all other Romans 
in the worship of the Emperors, as this was more 
of an act of patriotism than religion. They felt 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPEEORS 69 

much as would a modern nation at a refusal to 
show respect to its flag, and as the Romans were 
almost constantly at war, it seemed to them like 
treason to the Empire. Moreover, this worship 
of the emperors was not required of all the in- 
habitants, but only of soldiers and civil officers. 
Although the Christians, in their written Apolo- 
gies for Christianity, only thinly disguised their 
hatred of Roman civilization, and barely veiled 
their intention of exterminating aU other cults 
should they get the upper hand, and at the same 
time openly sought the glory of martyrdom, the 
actual number of martyred Christians was far 
below those claimed by later Christian writers. 

Professor Bury, a thoroughly reliable Roman 
scholar, says: ''There were some executions in 
the second century — not many that are well at- 
tested. '^ Of the third century he says: 
* ' Throughout this century, there were not many 
victims, though afterwards the Christians in- 
vented a whole mythology of martyrdoms. Many 
cruelties were imputed to Emperors under whom 
we know that the Church enjoyed perfect 
peace. ' ' Later, the Emperor Diocletian made a 
long and bloody attempt to suppress Christian- 
ity. When this was found impossible, because of 
their increased numbers, the Emperors who fol- 
lowed him discontinued the persecution, and 



70 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

issued edicts of toleration, in the years 311 and 
313 A. D. These documents clearly present the 
Roman attitude, as will be seen from Gibbon's 
translation of the first one to appear in the east- 
em provinces: 

^ ^ We were particularly desirous of reclaiming 
into the way of reason and nature the deluded 
Christians, who had renounced the religion and 
ceremonies instituted by their fathers and pre- 
sumptuously despising the practice of antiquity, 
had invented extravagent laws and opinions ac- 
cording to the dictates of their fancy, and had 
collected a various society from the different 
provinces of our Empire. The edicts which we 
have published to enforce the worship of the 
gods, having exposed many of the Christians to 
danger and distress, many having suffered death 
and many more, who still persist in their impious 
folly, being left destitute of any public exercise 
of religion, we are disposed to extend to those 
unhappy men the effects of our wonted clem- 
ency. We permit them, therefore, freely to pro- 
fess their private opinions, and to assemble in 
their conventicles without fear or molestation, 
provided always that they preserve a due respect 
to the established laws and government. ' ' 

The second edict, known as the Edict of Milan, 
brings us to the period of Constantine, who was 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 71 

its author, and whose chief claim to fame is, that 
he was the first Christian Emperor. In the con- 
fusion of opinion as to the merits of his con- 
version, it is quite clear that political interest 
played a greater part than individual conviction, 
in his declaration for the new religion. The Em- 
peror Diocletian adopted the idea of leaving his 
rulership of the vast Roman Empire to a num- 
ber of Emperors who should divide the Empire 
among them, and rule as colleagues. Instead of 
which they became bitter rivals, plotting and 
counter-plotting for supremacy. This struggle 
was at its zenith when Constantine succeeded his 
father Constantius, as Emperor of the West. At 
York, in Britain, where he was present at his 
father's death, he accepted the nomination to his 
father's place, tendered him by the army, and 
shrewdly laid his plans to overthrow his rivals, 
and make himself supreme ruler. By this time 
the Christians had become so numerous, that 
the announcement of his conversion to that faith 
secured him supporters in every town, and sol- 
diers in every army. It was while marching to 
the battle of Milvain Bridge, near Rome, where 
he conquered Maxentius, one of his rival Em- 
perors, that he is said to have seen at noonday, 
a flaming cross in the sky, with the motto ^'By 
this conquer." This story has met with a variety 



72 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

of reception, from the complete belief of the 
Christian historian Eusebius, who claims to have 
had it from the Emperor's own lips, to the 
scepticism of Gibbon, who treats it as a fable. 
Gibbon has probably anticipated the final judg- 
ment of posterity. 

Constantine was never more than half Chris- 
tian, half pagan. He attempted to combine the 
worship of Christ and Apollo, and npon his coins 
was the inscription of one and the image of the 
other. In this he was typical of Christianity 
itself, which, as the least research reveals, copied 
the great body of its ceremonies from the reli- 
gious customs of pre-Christian Rome. Constan- 
tine also held for a time to the Roman policy of 
toleration. When the Christian church divided 
over the teachings of Arius, the Church Presby- 
ter of Alexandria, who dissented from the doc- 
trine of the co-eternity of the Trinity, insisting 
that it was impossible for the son to be as old as 
the father, Constantine desired a creed which 
would be broad enough to accept both parties to 
the controversy. He saw that his administra- 
tion would be more effectively supported by a 
united Church. When he observed the Chris- 
tian controversialists long enough to see that 
they had not the slightest notions of tolerance, 
he took sides with the most powerful sect and 



^ 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 73 

issued the following edict against Arius : * ' This 
also I enjoin, that if any one shall be found to 
have concealed any writing composed by Arius, 
and shall not immediately bring it and consume 
it in the fire, death shall be his punishment ; for 
as soon as ever he is taken in this crime, he shall 
suffer capital punishment. God preserve you/^ 
It was Constantine who summoned the cele- 
brated Council of Nicea, A. D. 325. His idea 
was that a council of the church rulers should 
draw up a written creed so that the Christians 
of the Empire might know what they should 
believe. Thus originated the Nicene creed. 
After the Nicean Council had decided against 
Arius, Constantine ordered his banishment. The 
supposed deliberation about the case of Arius in 
the Council was a pretense maintained for the 
sake of appearances ; the fate of the Alexandrian 
had been determined before the Council gath- 
ered. The historian Draper says: ^^No contem- 
porary for a moment supposed that this was an 
assembly of simple-hearted men, anxious by a 
mutual comparison of thought, to ascertain the 
truth. Its aim was not to compose such a creed 
as would give unity to the Church, but one so 
worded that the Arians would be compelled to 
refuse to sign it, and so ruin themselves. ' ' 



74 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Constantine 's sister, Constantia, was a mem- 
ber of the Arian party and she eventually suc- 
ceeded in converting him to the side of the 
Presbyter. This led to Arius being restored to 
imperial favor. He was invited to Constanti- 
nople, which had been the city of Byzantium un- 
til the change was made to perpetuate the name 
of the Emperor, and Alexander the Bishop of 
that city, was ordered to receive him into com- 
munion the day following his arrival. Bishop 
Alexander was a fanatical supporter of the anti- 
Arians. On receiving the Emperor's orders he 
fled from the Church and falling prostrate he 
prayed to God that he would interpose and save 
his servant from being forced into this sin, even 
if it should be by death. The only possible in- 
terpretation of this prayer is that it was a sup- 
plication for the death of Arius, and strangely 
enough that very evening as Arius was walking 
along the streets, he was seized with a sudden 
and violent illness, hastened into a house and 
died. Those familiar with Asiatic crimes of the 
period have never doubted that he was poisoned, 
and one historian says 'Hhe difference is little 
between praying for the death of a man and 
compassing if 

Before and during the reign of Constantine, 
the Church gave a dramatic imitation of the 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 75 

bloody struggle between co-reigning Emperors 
for supremacy, in the fierce encounters between 
the bishops of Alexandria, Rome, and Constan- 
tinople, each seeking to be supreme authority in 
the Church. It was the common custom for 
churchmen, seeking places of power in the 
church, to maintain bodies of supporters drawn 
chiefly from the rabble of the streets, and be- 
tween these bloody battles were often fought. 
Macedonius, the Bishop of Alexandria, passed 
over the slaughtered bodies of three thousand 
people to take possession of his episcopal throne. 
The Bishopric of Rome was often bitterly fought 
for because the prodigal gifts of the rich Roman 
ladies made it a luxurious possession. At the 
election of Damasus, a hundred and thirty of the 
slain lay in the basilica of Cisinnius; the con- 
spirators had called in the aid of a rabble of 
gladiators, charioteers, and other ruffians, and 
the riot had to be ended by the intervention of 
the Imperial troops. "When the bishops met to 
discuss questions of Church doctrine, they often 
had crowds of bathmen outside armed with 
bludgeons to save a lost argument by the test of 
battle. 

From the time Christianity assumed the pur- 
ple in the time of Constantine, the Emperors be- 
gan to feel that the Christian religion was not 



76 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

content to be a servant of the state, but that its 
official heads sought to be rivals of the Em- 
perors and would not hesitate to be their mas- 
ters. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, who 
belonged to the orthodox party, when the Em- 
peror Constantius, Constantine's son and suc- 
cessor, was on the side of the Arians, openly de- 
fied the Emperor and challenged his authority. 
Here was forged a weapon which was used by 
the Popes with terrible results in the succeed- 
ing centuries. This was the power of the Church 
to absolve the subjects of an imperial ruler from 
his claim to their allegiance, on the ground that 
first obedience must be rendered to the divine 
power, which was able to punish their souls and 
which took precedence of the imperial power, 
which was only able to punish with death and 
the seizure of goods. 

During this rivalry, the bishops indicated to 
the civil rulers such heretics as they wished to 
have punished, and the rulers were made to feel 
that if the wishes of the ecclesiastics were not 
observed dire results might follow. Even Con- 
stantine was made to feel this pressure to the 
point of causing the death of his old friend, 
Sopater the philosopher. Sopater was accused 
by the superstitious Christians of binding the 
winds in an adverse quarter by the influence of 



CHRISTIANS AND EMPERORS 77 

magic so that the corn ships could not reach 
Constantinople. The Emperor was obliged to 
give orders for his decapitation in order to sat- 
isfy the Christian mob in the theater. 

The grand historic struggle between religion, 
as represented by Christianity, and science, 
where it had reached its highest expression in 
Alexandria, was connected with the reign of the 
Emperor Theodosius, the Spaniard, who wore 
the purple toward the close of the fourth cen- 
tury. Theodosius was one of the most ardent 
Christians who ever held the Roman scepter. He 
was determined upon the extirpation of all anti- 
Christian ideas and the supremacy of official 
religion. It was largely because of the services 
he rendered in this field that he came to be 
known as Theodosius, the great. Before noting 
the consequences of his policy in Alexandria, it 
will be necessary to resume the narrative of the 
preceding chapter. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ALEXANDRIA TRAGEDY 

DURING a battle fought in Alexandria 
between Julius Caesar and the last of 
the Ptolemies, the great library in the 
Museum caught fire, but the daughter library 
in the Serapion escaped. "When the Alexan- 
drian libraries were being formed by the early 
Ptolemaic kings, the king of Pergamos had set 
about securing a rival collection. The Ptolemies 
replied to his rivalry by forbidding the exporta- 
tion of papyrus, but the king of Pergamos suc- 
ceeded in building a library of 200,000 volumes 
through the invention of parchment. Cleopatra, 
the last of the Ptolemaic line, was disconsolate 
over the burning of the library in the Museum 
and Marc Antony to make amends for the catas- 
trophe, presented to Cleopatra the library of 
Pergamos. This probably made the Serapion 
library about half a million volumes and larger 
than had been the library of the Museum. It 
was now the greatest collection of learning in 
existence in the world. 

The Serapion, however, gave constant offense 
to the Christian Archbishop of Alexandria, the 
notorius and infamous Theophilus. He hated 
the Serapion because it was associated with the 

78 



THE ALEXANDRIA TRAGEDY 79 

worship of the Egyptian gods. This attitude of 
Theophilus was typical of the attitude of the 
Alexandrian Christians in general. Everything 
in the Serapion came under their suspicion. They 
despised the brazen circles by which Eratos- 
thenes had measured the size of the earth and 
Timocharis had determined the motions of 
Venus. The astronomical instruments which had 
been used for forty years on the terrace of the 
Serapion by Claudius Ptolemy ^'The Prince of 
Astronomers" meant nothing to the ignorant 
Theophilus, all he awaited was an opportunity 
to vent his wrath on this magnificent temple and 
all it contained. This opportunity came through 
a bequest formally made by the Emperor Con- 
stantius, son of Constantine, of the site of an 
ancient temple of Osiris for the erection of a 
Christian church. While digging the founda- 
tions they discovered the obscene symbols of 
phallic worship, and with more zeal than mod- 
esty or discretion, Theophilus had them exhibit- 
ed to the derision of the ignorant rabble in the 
market place. The shocked and astounded 
Egyptians rose to avenge the insult to their 
ancient faith. A riot ensued, the Egyptian party 
being led by the philosopher Olympus. The 
Egyptians took up their headquarters in the 
Serapion, from which they sallied forth from 



80 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

time to time to do battle with the Christia:ns. 
The dispute was finally referred for settlement 
to the Emperor. On the arrival of the decision 
of Theodosius the Egyptians laid down their 
arms, little expecting what that decision would 
be. Theodosius, who was notoriously ignorant, 
enjoined that the building should be destroyed 
and entrusted the task to the willing Theophilus. 
He began his labors with the destruction of the 
library, one of the most sinister deeds ever per- 
foitoed deliberately in all the history of learn- 
ing. He did not rest until the magnificent 
temple was in hopeless ruins. 

A few years later the Archbishop Theophilus 
had died and his position had been taken by his 
nephew Cyril, who had lived for five years 
among the monks of Nitria. Cyril was the fash- 
ionable preacher of Alexandria and had a large 
congregation. His pagan critics asserted that 
the clapping of hands at the most eloquent pass- 
ages of his sermons were performed by persons 
arranged in the congregation and paid for their 
approval. From which it appears that the 
'^claque'' is not an entirely modern insti- 
tution. Cyril's activities were not confined 
to the preaching of eloquent and fashion- 
able sermons. The division of the population 
of the city into Pagans, Jews, and Christians, 



h 



THE ALEXANDEIA TKAGEDY 81 

now that Greek toleration had disappeared, re- 
sulted in constant bloody brawls between the 
rabble of the various sections. In these street 
feuds Cyril had more than once been the insti- 
gator of the Christians. He also set them on to 
mob and sack the synagogues and pillage the 
houses of the Jews, and sought to drive them 
from the city. The Prefect Orestes was obliged 
to interfere to stop the riots, but Cyril was not 
disposed to recognize the authority of the Pre- 
fect. His old associates, the half wild Nitrian 
monks, swarmed in from the desert five hundred 
strong. One of their leaders, Ammonius, 
wounded the Prefect in the head with a stone. 
The non-Christian citizens, dismayed by this law- 
less performance, seized Ammonius and had him 
executed by the lictor. Cyril however, caused 
his body to be taken to the Caesareum, laid in 
state, buried with unasual honors, and cannon- 
ized as a holy martyr. 

There was something else in Alexandria which 
disturbed the complacency of the Archbishop 
Cyril more than the Pagans and Jews. This was 
a beautiful young woman, the now celebrated 
Hypatia. She was the daughter of Theon, the 
mathematician, and was distinguished as a bril- 
liant lecturer on the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian 
philosophies. She was also the author of works 



] 



82 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

in exposition of the geometry of ApoUonius and 
others. Her lecture room was crowded with an 
andience more fashionable and wealthy even 
than that of Cyril. This was a source of con- 
stant bitterness to the Archbishop, who not only 
loathed her doctrines but resented her greater 
success. 

Cyril decided to rid himself of his rival, and 
the '^bare-legged, black-cowled fiends" of the 
Nitrian desert were again brought in. By 
Cja'iPs instructions they were ambushed outside 
the lecture room. What followed is described by 
Eobertson as ''one of the vilest episodes in the 
whole history of religion." As it is one of the 
most important events in the long struggle be- 
tween science and superstition, it is presented 
here as narrated by the celebrated Roman 
scholar and historian, Gibbon, in the forty-sev- 
enth chapter of his "Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire. " 

"Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathe- 
matician, was initiated in her father's studies: 
Her learned comments have elucidated the geom- 
etry of ApoUonius and Diophantus: and she 
publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, 
the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the 
bloom of beauty and in the maturity of wisdom, 
the modest maid refused her lovers and instruct- 



THE ALEXANDRIA TRAGEDY 83 

ed her disciples ; the persons most illustrious for 
their rank or merit were impatient to visit the 
female philosopher ; and Cyril beheld, with jeal- 
ous eye the gorgeous train of horses and slaves 
who crowded the door of her academy. 

*'A rumor was spread among the Christians 
that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle 
to the reconciliation of the Prefect and the Arch- 
bishop ; and that obstacle was speedily removed. 
On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, 
Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped 
naked, dragged to the church and inhumanly 
butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and 
a troop of merciless fanatics; her flesh was 
scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, 
and her quivering limbs were delivered to the 
flames. The just progress of inquiry and pun- 
ishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but 
the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an in- 
delible stain on the character and religion of 
Cyril of Alexandria. ' ' 

After the cowardly murder of Hypatia, Greek 
learning lingered in scattered places for another 
century. In the third century, Porphyry, the 
celebrated pupil of Plotinus, had opened a school 
in Rome which had attained a great reputation 
in the teaching of astronomy and geography and 
other sciences. He was the author of a book 



84 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

which contradicted the Christian religion and 
was replied to by Eusebius and St. Jerome. The 
most effective reply, however, was that of the 
Emperor Theodosius in the fourth century, who 
ordered all copies to be burned. The burning of 
the books containing Greek science and the per- 
secution of any one found owning such books 
became a steady Christian policy, which burst 
forth into special action every time a very ardent 
Christian rose to power. The result was that 
men everywhere burnt the most precious vol- 
umes in their private libraries as a measure of 
self -protection against the Christians. 

A hundred years after Theodosius came a still 
more earnest and fanatical Christian Emperor in 
Justinian. Justinian's anxiety to promote the 
faith among unwilling heathen resulted in seven- 
ty thousand forced baptisms in Asia Minor 
alone, and his determination to stamp out heresy 
brought on a bloody war with the Phrygians. 
His most notorious act was to give Greek philoso- 
phy and science the final death wound, by order- 
ing the closing of the schools in Athens A. D. 
529. When this order was enforced, the last 
representatives of Greek learning, Damasius, 
Simplisius, and Isadoras, who had been profes- 
sors in the schools now closed, went as exiles to 
Persia. They returned when Chosroes, the Em- 



THE ALEXANDRIA TRAGEDY 85 

peror of Persia, made his treaty of peace with 
the Romans, in which he stipulated safety and 
toleration for the exiled Greek philosophers. 
They returned to find however that Greek learn- 
ing had been martyred and the Christian faith 
had been crowned in its place. Then came to a 
close a thousand years of Greek intellectual de- 
velopment which will illuminate the pages of 
history to the end of time. Thanks to Chris- 
tianity, it was followed by a thousand years of 
intellectual darkness, which will be known as the 
Dark Ages as long as history continues to be 
written. 

It is impossible to read the history of the 
struggle between science and superstition from 
the days of Thales to the deeds of Justinian with- 
out arriving at the conclusion reached by one of 
America's first scholars, the dean of American 
sociologists, Lester F. Ward, that ^ * Christianity 
proscribed philosophy, abolished the schools, and 
plunged the world into an abyss of darkness 
from which it only emerged after twelve hun- 
dred years. Ignorant of what would have hap- 
pened if this had not happened, nothing is left 
but to regard the advent of Christianity as a 
calamity." 

As it will be impossible in this small volume 
to consider at length the developments of the 



86 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Dark Ages, which were dark largely because of 
the triumphs of Christianity in Europe, we will 
briefly trace the chief outlines. Until quite re- 
cently, it was the fashion to quote the Christian 
Fathers, but modern examination of their writ- 
ings has put this out of vogue by showing that 
no enlightenment, human or divine, raised them 
above the dense ignorance of their time; an 
ignorance for which they themselves were in no 
slight degree responsible. Their attitude toward 
science is depicted by St. Augustine, the Bishop 
of Hippo, who contended that it was useless to 
study the structure of the universe, as the scrip- 
tures said there was soon to be a new heaven 
and a new earth. 

"With the capture of Alexandria by Omar in 
the seventh century, the Arabians came in con- 
tact with such Greek books as had escaped de- 
struction by the Christians, and throughout the 
succeeding centuries the torch of science was 
kept burning by the Saracens. It was the re- 
newal of contact between Arabia and Europe, as 
in the case of the Moors in Spain, which revived 
the sacred flame in Europe. The works of the 
Alexandrian astronomers and mathematicians, 
which had been translated into Arabic, were to- 
ward the close of the Middle Ages translated 
from the Arabic into the European languages. 



THE ALEXANDRIA TRAGEDY 87 

The great work of Copernicns ^'De Revolutioni- 
bus, ' ' which is the foundation of modern astron- 
omy shows the germination of modern knowledge 
from seeds originally planted by the Greeks. 

Copernicus had great difficulty in securing the 
publication of his book and did not dare attempt 
it in Catholic countries. Even in Protestant 
countries the opposition to the new ideas was 
bitter. In order to escape as far as possible the 
notice and opposition of Protestant leaders at 
Wittenberg, a natural center of publication, it 
was intrusted to the publisher Osiander at 
Nuremberg, but Osiander knew the danger and 
his courage failed him. Copernicus died without 
seeing his book completed and never knew of the 
treachery of Osiander in the insertion of a 
crawling preface by himself, but supposed for 
some time to be by the author, in which it was 
declared that the teachings of the book were 
merely intended as indulgences of the imagina- 
tion. For many years this historic work of the 
Canon of Frauenberg passed almost unnoticed, 
except for a small group of scholars who per- 
ceived its importance, only to become a standard 
of battle raised by the noted Bruno and the no 
less illustrious Galileo. 



CHAPTER VI 

BRUNO THE WANDERER 

BEUNO was born at the middle of the six- 
teenth century — 1548 — in the township 
of Nola, near Naples. His father, Gio- 
vanni, was a soldier and, probably as a compli- 
ment to King Philip of Spain, who then ruled 
the Kingdom of Naples, Bruno was named Filip- 
po. The name which he made famous in history, 
Giordano, was assumed according to custom when 
he entered the religious order of the Dominicans. 
An example of the impressions which religion 
made on Bruno's mind in his boyhood may be 
found in the story he told in later life which has 
its scene in a neighboring village. Bruno tells 
how Scipio Savolino used to confess his sins once 
a year on Holy Friday to the Cure, Don Paulino, 
who in addition to being his father confessor on 
one day of the year, was his boon companion on 
every other day. Although Scipio acknowledged 
that his sins ''were many and great'' his old 
companion, the Cure, had no difficulty in absolv- 
ing him. One performance of the ceremony was 
enough and in succeeding years Scipio would 
say to Don Paulino, ''Father Mine, the sins of 
a year ago today, you know them;" and Don 
Paulino would reply, ' ' Son, thou knowest the ab- 

88 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 89 

solution of a year ago today — go in peace and 
sin no more ! ' ' This story reflects the temper of 
the Church, which was rigid in the matter of be- 
lief and notoriously lax on the question of 
morals. This laxity of the Church was one of 
the important contributory factors to the Luth- 
eran Reformation. 

In his early youth Bruno had a striking lesson 
in that deceptiveness of appearances which was 
responsible for so many mistakes about the origin 
and structure of the universe. From his home 
he could see Mount Vesuvius; it looked dark, 
barren, rugged, and repellant, and he had this 
idea of it for many years. When he grew old 
enough to visit it, he found its slopes to be a 
perfect garden, rich in forms and colors, while 
now it was the slopes of his own garden-decked 
hill which looked barren and gloomy in the dis- 
tance. This incident greatly impressed Bruno 
and probably helped him to discard current 
theories about the universe based on what is 
seen, and to accept the Copernican explanation, 
which contradicts all appearances. 

To criticise Bruno for entering the Church 
would be to display a lack of historical sense. 
In the sixteenth century in Italy, the Church 
presented almost the only opportunity for a 
career, especially to one who was studious but 



90 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

not rich. He had an opportunity to see the 
Church at its worst, as he joined the Dominican 
Order, which was the narrowest and most bigoted 
and had control of the Inquisition. At this time 
the doings of the Inquisition had become un- 
bearable, resulting in riots, two of whose ring- 
leaders were beheaded. The Waldenses were be- 
ing subjected to a persecution by the Church, 
which was then at the zenith of its brutality. 
This was a sect which had risen in the south of 
France, as disciples of Peter Waldo. Their 
preacher explained the scriptures and urged men 
to holy lives, which was regarded by the mother 
Church as an important usurpation of ecclesias- 
tical functions. The Waldenses protested 
against indulgences, which they said had nearly 
abolished prayer, fasting, and alms. They also 
protested against prayers for the dead, assert- 
ing that their souls had already gone either to 
heaven or to hell. When Bruno was thirteen 
years old, in one single day the Church butchered 
eighty-eight Waldenses with the same knife, 
their bodies being quartered and scattered along 
the road to Calabria. This was the period when 
the Catholic Church was taking the steps which 
it considered necessary as a result of the Luth- 
eran Reformation of half a century earlier. 
These measures consisted in the institution of 



BEUNO THE WANDEREE 91 

the Order of the Jesuits, the establishment of the 
Inquisition, and the censorship of the press by 
means of the Index of forbidden books. At the 
Council of Trent it was decided that the Order 
of Jesus, founded by Loyola in order to prevent 
further developments of the Lutheran type, was 
to set itself *Ho erase with fire and sword the 
least traces of heresy/^ Little did Bruno rea- 
lize what this decision would mean for him. 
The signs of the coming heretic were evident 
in Bruno even during his novitiate. "Written 
charges were drawn up against him for giving 
away some images of the saints which should 
have been carefully kept. As the monks were 
forbidden to study serious works, which might 
lead to heretical opinions, their minds were dis- 
tracted and amused by foolish books which were 
highly recommended by the ecclesiastical au- 
thorities. One of these was called the '^ Seven 
Delights of the Madonna.'' This book Bruno 
advised the monks to throw aside and to devote 
their attention to the best of the books they were 
allowed to read, especially recommending the 
** Lives of the Fathers.'' The first charges were 
torn up by the Prior, but later more serious ac- 
cusations of having spoken favorably of the 
Arian heresy in a private conversation convinced 
him that he was in danger, and while the process 



92 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

was pending, lie fled from Naples and went to 
Rome. 

While Bruno was in Rome staying in the clois- 
ter of Minerva, news reached him that steps were 
being taken to begin a third action against him 
at Rome itself. This action was to be composed 
of thirty articles, the principal evidence against 
him being the discovery of a certain heretical 
book which he supposed he had safely disposed 
of before leaving Naples. As this threatened to 
be serious, he decided to flee from Rome. 

Bruno was now twenty-eight years of age and 
his flight from Rome marks the beginning of six- 
teen years of constant wandering through 
Europe. This method of living seems to have 
been greatly facilitated by the customs of the 
period. The wandering scholar seems to have 
been a usual figure in the sixteenth century. 
Bruno selected the cities he visited from two 
principal consideration : first, whether they con- 
tained universities at which he might lecture; 
and, second, whether they had printing estab- 
lishments where he might produce his books. 
When Bruno entered a university town, he ap- 
pears to have gone directly to the university and 
sought employment as a specialist in the art of 
training the memory. As the preaching of long 
sermons was one of the principal public func- 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 93 

tions of the time and congregations objected, 
then as now, to reading from manuscript, ability 
to memorize had great value and was greatly 
sought in the universities. Bruno had obtained 
his system from a close study of the works of 
Raymond Lully, who had a great reputation as 
a writer on the memory. Whether Bruno's sys- 
tem had any special merit, we have no means 
of knowing, but it certainly did not deserve the 
name of science which he gave it. It is quite 
probable that Bruno himself valued it chiefly 
as a means of securing quick employment, 
much as Kepler published his astrological al- 
manac in which he did not believe, and used 
the proceeds of its sale to devote his time to 
the study of astronomy. It appears that when 
Bruno found himself settled in a university 
and began to feel his position secure, he also 
began to express his real opinions, which were 
in violent contradiction to those of his col- 
leagues. 

The bitter conflicts which invariably arose 
between Bruno and the other teachers in the 
universities usually had their origin in the criti- 
cism of Aristotelian philosophy. All through 
this period Aristotle had an authority second 
only to the scriptures. It must be remembered, 
however, that Aristotle, as taught in the univer- 



94 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

sities and sustained by the Church as being al- 
most a part of the divine revelation, was not 
Aristotle as known to the Greeks or to the 
moderns. The uses which were made of the 
writings of Aristotle to sustain the dogmas of 
the medieval Church would have greatly 
amazed the peripatetic philosopher himself. 
The idea that his works contained the sum of 
all human knowledge and that his opinions 
should be binding on the human race to the end 
of time had never occurred to him, and had 
such a notion been expressed to him it would 
undoubtedly have provoked his fierce denunci- 
ation. The bogus Aristotle of the mediaeval 
Church was the creation of the astute, thir- 
teenth century theologian, Thomas Aquinas, 
known as the ^'divine'' Thomas. Aristotle 
had been considered the chief bulwark 
of infidelity; after the transformation, the 
contradiction of his opinions was fraught 
with danger of capital punishment. Al- 
though Bruno did much to shake the 
authority of the Stagirite, it remained 
long in vogue. In Paris in 1624, twenty- 
four years after Bruno 's death, the theologians 
induced parliament to issue a decree against 
all who publicly opposed Aristotle. Five years 
after the same parliament, urged by the theo- 



BRUNO THE WANDEEER 95 

logical department of the University of Paris 
— the Sorbonne — decreed that an attack on 
Aristotle should be considered and dealt with 
as an attack on the Church. 

The strength of Aristotle as an authority in 
the universities is well illustrated in the story 
told by George Henry Lewes, who considers 
Bruno a figure in the history of philosophy. 
*'A young student thought he observed spots 
on the sun and related the incident to a priest, 
by whom he was counseled as follows : ^My son, 
I have read Aristotle many times and I assure 
you there is nothing of the kind mentioned by 
him. Go rest in peace, and be certain that the 
spots you have seen are in your eyes and not 
in the sun.' '^ 

In the intervals in which Bruno was not en- 
gaged in writing or in teaching in the univer- 
sities, he managed to make a scant livelihood as 
private tutor. He sometimes worked as jour- 
neyman printer, being a skilful typesetter. He 
visited so many towns and cities during his 
wanderings that a mere catalogue of them 
would be confusing. In this narrative only the 
principal places will be given. The first town 
he visited was Noli, on the Gulf of Genoa, which 
also served as a refuge for Dante when in exile. 
He taught grammar to boys and astronomy and 



96 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

cosmography to a group of gentlemen. After 
a stay of four or five months, he went to Savona, 
to Turin, and finally to Venice. Here he spent 
six weeks trying to find employment, but the 
principal offices and schools were closed on ac- 
count of the plague which was destroying the 
inhabitants of the town. He managed, how- 
ever, to get out his first book, which has not 
been preserved, entitled ^* Signs of the Times." 
This book was probably — to borrow a simile 
from the artists — a pot boiler, intended to en- 
able its author to make a small sum for im- 
mediate necessities. It was followed by another 
work, ''The Ark of Noah." 

''The Ark of Noah" was one of several sat- 
ires which Bruno wrote and published from 
time to time, with a daring which amazed his 
more timid contemporaries. The book repre- 
sented the animals assembled to settle a dis- 
pute about rank. The ass was in great danger 
of losing his pre-eminent position in the poop 
of the ark because his power was in his hoofs 
rather than in his head. It is quite probable 
that the readers of the book interpreted the 
ass to be the representative of the monks, and 
it is said that one of the popes considered the 
sarcasm as aimed at himself. Asininity was 
Bruno's favorite epithet for the expression of 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 97 

his contempt for the ignorance and stupidity 
of the monks. 

''From Venice/' Brnno tells us, *'I went to 
Padua, where I found some fathers of the or- 
der of St. Dominic, whom I knew; they per- 
suaded me to resume the habit, even though I 
should not wish to return to the order, as it 
was more convenient for travel : with this idea 
I went to Bergamo, and had a robe made of 
cheap white cloth, placing it over the scapular 
which I had kept when I left Rome.'' As he 
was traveling from Bergamo to Lyons, he was 
warned that he would meet scant sympathy at 
the latter place and turned his face in the di- 
rection of Geneva, which at that time was the 
home of exiles of all nations, and especially of 
Italians. In the book of the Rector of the 
Academy at Geneva for the year 1579, under 
the date of May 22, is the name Philippus 
Brunus, written in his own hand. As there has 
been considerable discussion as to whether or 
not Bruno accepted the religion of Calvin dur- 
ing his stay in Geneva, the following state- 
ment, made by himself before the Court of 
Venice when he was on trial in that city and 
found in Document 9, seems to be decisive. 
When he arrived in Geneva, he was called upon 
by a distinguished exile and reformer, the 



98 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Marquis of Vico, a Neapolitan. The statement 
to the Court relates to his conversation with 
the Marquis : 

*'He asked me who I was, and whether I had 
come to stay there and to profess the religion 
of the city, to which, after I had given an ac- 
count of myself and of my reasons for abandon- 
ing the Order, I said that I had no intention 
of professing the religion of the city, not know- 
ing what it was, and that therefore I wished 
rather to remain living in freedom and secur- 
ity, than in any other manner. I was per- 
suaded, in any case, to lay aside the habit I 
wore ; so I had made for myself from the cloth 
a pair of trews and other things, while the 
Marquis himself, with other Italians, gave me 
a sword, hat, cape, and other necessaries of 
clothing, and enabled me to support myself so 
far by correcting proofs. I stayed about two 
months, and attended at times the preachings 
and discussions, both of Italians and French- 
men who lectured and preached in the city; 
among others, I heard several times Nicolo Bal- 
bani of Lucca, who read on the epistles of St. 
Paul, and preached the Gospels; but having 
been told that I could not remain there long 
if I did not make up my mind to adopt the re- 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 99 

ligion of the city, for if not I should receive 
no assistance, I resolved to leave. ' ' 

Documents published by Dufour in 1884, 
dealing with Bruno's stay in Geneva, prove 
conclusively that he had additional reasons for 
leaving Geneva. The chief of these was a con- 
troversy which arose between himself and De 
La Faye, who was then professor of philosophy 
in the Academy. Bruno caused to be printed 
a reply to De La Faye in which he enumerated 
twenty errors made by the professor in one of 
his lectures. As the professor was almost all 
powerful with the authorities of the city, life 
in Geneva was made extremely unpleasant for 
Bruno, though he probably had the best of the 
controversy so far as merits were concerned. 
The power of the Church was invoked against 
him and he left Geneva with an impression, 
which he never changed, that narrow and 
bigoted as were the Lutheran Protestants, they 
were less so than the Calvinists. On the whole, 
Bruno escaped rather easily from the city in 
which Calvin only twenty-six years before had 
burned its ablest scientific man, Michael Ser- 
vetus, because of his disagreement with the 
doctrine of the trinity. 

From Geneva, he went to Lyons, where he 
found it impossible to make a living, and 



100 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

passed on to Toulouse, which boasted one of 
the most flourishing universities of the period. 
While Bruno was conducting private classes, a 
chair of the university fell vacant and he was 
allowed to compete for it. He took a doctor's 
degree in theology and secured the chair by 
the free election of students. Here he remained 
for two years, lecturing on the teachings of 
Aristotle and here, as almost everywhere, his 
departure was brought about by opinions 
which he expressed in conversations and dis- 
cussions. Toulouse was a bad city for heretics, 
as was demonstrated thirty-five years later by 
the burning of Vanini. 

In the latter part of 1581, Bruno set foot in 
the streets of Paris, still slippery with the 
blood of the Eve of St. Bartholomew. Here he 
delivered a course of thirty lectures on the 
^'thirty divine attributes," which brought him 
an offer of a professorship. This, however, he 
could not accept, as it required that he attend 
mass, which he refused to do. His fame had 
reached the ears of Henry III, who was then 
very much interested in philosophy and who 
desired to satisfy himself as to whether Bruno 's 
art of memory was a natural process or based 
on magic. Bruno proved to him that a pow- 
erful memory was a purely natural product. 



BEUNO THE WANDERER 101 

While in Paris on this first visit, he published 
many books, one on the '^Art of Memory,'' be- 
ing dedicated to the King. Brunnhof er speak- 
ing of the art of memory taught by Bruno, 
says, '^The art was a convenient means of in- 
troducing Bruno to strange universities, gain- 
ing him favor with the great, or helping him 
out of pressing money troubles. It was his 
exoteric philosophy, with which he could 
carefully drape his philosophy of religion hos- 
tile to the Church, and ride as hobby horse in 
his unfruitful humours.'' His Parisian writ- 
ings reveal him as an ardent disciple of Co- 
pernicus, which also brought him into conflict 
with the accepted authorities. His lectures in 
Paris were highly successful and Nostitz, who 
was one of his pupils, wrote thirty-three years 
later: *'He was able to discourse impromptu 
on any subject suggested, to speak without 
preparation extensively and eloquently, and he 
attracted many pupils and admirers in Paris." 
By 1583, however, he had come into conflict 
with conventional opinion and found it desir- 
able to seek the wider tolerance of London. 

England in the days of Elizabeth was a 
refuge to the religious exiles of many nations, 
and Italians were especially welcome. Eliza- 
beth had two Italian physicians and conversed 



102 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

with them in their own language. The Eliza- 
bethan court attracted and encouraged masters 
of literature, who have made the period 
famous. These were the days of Shake- 
speare, Spenser, and Jonson. In the early- 
months of 1583, Bruno was in Oxford, which 
was the English stronghold of Aristotelian 
philosophy. One of its statutes said that: 
^* Bachelors and Masters who did not follow 
Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five 
shillings for every point of divergence,'' and 
the records of the university show that teach- 
ers had been expelled for dissenting from the 
teachings of the Greek. Oxford was cold and 
conservative, a reputation which it has never 
since lost. It had none of the enthusiasm of 
French and Italian institutions and one can 
well imagine the chill reception accorded 
Bruno's letter asking permission to lecture 
there, which read as follows : 

'*To the most excellent, the Vice-Chancellor 
of the University of Oxford, its most famous 
Doctors and celebrated Masters — Salutation 
from Philotheus Jordanus Brunus of Nola, 
Doctor of a more scientific theology, professor 
of a purer and less harmful learning, known in 
the chief universities of Europe, a philosopher 
approved and honourably received, a stranger 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 103 

with none but the uncivilised and ignoble, a 
wakener of sleeping minds, tamer of presump- 
tions and obstinate ignorance, who in all re- 
spects professes a general love of man, and 
cares not for the Italian more than for the 
Briton, male more than female, the mitre more 
than the crown, the toga more than the coat 
of mail, the cowled more than the uncowled; 
but loves him who in intercourse is the more 
peaceable, friendly and useful, whom only- 
propagators of folly and hypocrites detest, 
whom the honourable and studious love, whom 
noble minds applaud. If this writing appears 
to conflict with the common and approved 
faith, understand that it is put forward by 
me not as absolutely true, but as more con- 
sonant with our senses and our reason, or at 
least less dissonant than the other side of the 
antithesis. And remember, that we are not so 
much eager to show our own knowledge, as 
moved by the desire of showing the weakness 
of the common philosophy, which thrusts for- 
ward what is mere opinion as if demonstrably 
proved, and of making it clear by our dis- 
cussion (if the gods grant it) how much in 
harmony with regulated sense, in consonance 
with the truth of the substance of things, is 



104 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

that which the garrulous multitude of plebeian 
philosophers ridicule as foreign to sense." 

Nevertheless Bruno lectured in Oxford and 
when the Polish prince, Alasco, was enter- 
tained by the faculty at a tournament of dis- 
putations, Bruno was one of the disputants. 
The Prince declares that ** these learned op- 
ponents, respondents, and moderators, ac- 
quitted themselves like themselves, sharplie 
and soundlie." Bruno was evidently well 
pleased with his part in the proceedings, de- 
claring that the representative put forward by 
the University could not meet his arguments 
and was left fifteen times "^like a hen in the 
stubble" and resorted to incivility and abuse. 
It is evident that Bruno cited Copernicus in 
the debate, for he says: '^The dispute grew 
envenomed. My antagonists took refuge in 
sarcasms and insults. One, seizing pen and 
paper, cried: ^Look, be silent and learn; I 
will teach you Ptolemy and Copernicus ! ' But 
as soon as he began to sketch the spheres, it 
was clear he had never opened Copernicus." 
This discussion seems to have had the usual 
result of getting Bruno into trouble and he 
departed in the sajne month for London. His 
most stinging blow at Oxford was his charac- 
terization of it as *Hhe widow of true learning." 



1l 



BRUNO THE WANDEEER 105 

During his stay in London, he found a quiet 
haven in the French Embassy. The French 
Ambassador, Mauvissiere, befriended him 
against all attacks, and Bruno's gratitude ap- 
pears in his dedication of one of the most im- 
portant of the many books he produced during 
his London sojourn: ''I, for the great favors 
enjoyed from you, food and shelter, freedom, 
safety, harbourage, who through you have es- 
caped so terrible and fierce a storm, to you 
consecrate this anchor, these shrouds and 
slackened sails, this so dear to me, more 
precious still to the future world, to the end 
that through your favour they may not fall a 
prey to the ocean of injustice, turbulence, and 
hostility." 

To the Venetian court inquiry he ex- 
plained that he was the Ambassador's ''gen- 
tleman," but it seems he was also his secre- 
tary, and as such accompanied him to Eliza- 
beth's court, where he was graciously received 
by the English Queen. One of the many counts 
against him at Venice, was the admiration for 
England's heretical Ruler, which he had, with 
the customary fulsomeness, expressed: ''That 
most singular and rare of ladies, who from this 
cold clime, near to the Arctic parallel, sheds a 
bright light upon all the terrestial globe. Eliza- 



106 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

beth, a Queen in title and in dignity, inferior 
to no King in all the world. For her judg- 
ment, counsel, and government, not easily sec- 
ond to any other that bears a sceptre in the 
earth. In her familiarity with the arts, knowl- 
edge of the sciences, understanding and prac- 
tice of all languages spoken in Europe by the 
people or the learned, I leave the whole world to 
judge what rank she should hold among 
princes.'' That Bruno was willing to modify 
this when on trial, appears from his answer to 
the charge of having called Elizabeth *' di- 
vine." ^'In my book on 'The Cause, Principle, 
and One,' I praise the Queen of England and 
call her 'divine,' not as a term of worship, but 
as an epithet such as the ancients used to ap- 
ply to their princes, and in England, where I 
then was, and where I composed this book, the 
title 'divine' is usually given to the Queen. 
I was the more inclined to call her so, that she 
knew me, as I went continually with the Am- 
bassador to court ; but I know I erred in prais- 
ing this lady, she being a heretic, and in call- 
ing her 'divine/ " 

The poetic Italian found a kindred soul in 
the elegant man of letters. Sir Phillip Sidney, 
whom he describes as "the most illustrious and 
excellent cavalier, one of the rarest and 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 107 

brightest spirits in the world.'' Of the seven 
works which came from Bruno's pen while in 
England, the two chief ethical works were 
dedicated to Sidney. It would be pleasant to 
believe that the greatest Italian met the most 
illustrious Englishman — Shakespeare — as some 
have asserted, but the facts are that Bruno left 
London in 1585, while Shakespeare did not 
come there until 1586. 

Among the books he published while in Eng- 
land was another satire in the vein of ''The 
Ark of Noah." It was entitled ''The Expul- 
sion of the Triumphant Beast." It was an 
allegorical prose poem, in which the repent- 
ant Jupiter resolved to drive out the beasts 
who occupied his heavenly firmament. At a 
council of the gods there is an illuminating dis- 
cussion of the history of religions. Such 
"beast" constellations as the Bear and the 
Scorpion, which represented vices, were to be 
expelled to make room for virtues. The "Tri- 
umphant Beast" was generally understood to 
mean the Pope, or the Church. Even more 
mercilessly satirical was "The Cabala," dedi- 
cated to an imaginary Bishop of Casamarciano, 
who is put forward as the representative of 
backwardness, ignorance, and simplicity. It 
has his favorite theme — ^the Asininity of the 



108 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

Monks or the Church. Referring probably to 
the last part of it, he says: ''The image and 
figure of the animal are well known, many have 
written on it, we among the rest, in a particu- 
lar fashion; but as it displeased the vulgar, 
and failed to please the wise, for its sinister 
meaning, the work was suppressed." 

Departing from London, probably in the 
company of the returning French Ambassador, 
Mauvissiere, Bruno arrived in Paris in the Oc- 
tober of 1585. He immediately sought to 
ameliorate the difficulties of his situation by 
having his excommunication lifted, and being 
admitted to the Church without being com- 
pelled to return to the priesthood. The Papal 
Nuncio, to whom he appealed, told him noth- 
ing could be even attempted unless he promised 
to return to his order. As Bruno considered 
this an impossible condition, the negotiations 
were abandoned. 

He found his heretical opinions were in 
great disfavor in Paris, and had no intention 
of staying there, but wished to do something 
in keeping with his doings on his former visit. 
He entered a public disputation to be held in 
the Royal Hall of the university. He drew up 
one hundred and twenty theses against the 
Aristotelian philosophy, which wa.8 the sub- 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 109 

stance of the teaching of the Sorbonne. On his 
side he had the more progressive college of 
Cambray, which later became the College of 
France. Bruno's chief attack in the debate, 
was published as *^The Awakener," and indi- 
cates how great must have been the contrast 
between his modern ideas and the medieval no- 
tions of his opponents. He showed them how 
their whole attitude towards Aristotle stood 
condemned by the writings of Aristotle him- 
self, and held he had the same right to criti- 
cize the Greek philosopher that he had to 
criticize his predecessors. The following are 
examples of his command of brilliant epigram 
in debate. Denouncing authority, he said, ''If 
we are really sick, it helps us nought that pub- 
lic opinion thinks we are really making for 
health.'' Again he said, ''It is a poor mind 
that will think with the multitude because it 
is a multitude ; truth is not altered by the opin- 
ions of the vulgar, or the confirmation of the 
many.'' And to the same effect, '*It is more 
blessed to be wise in truth in face of opinion 
than to be wise in opinion in face of truth." 
Turning from France to Protestant Germany, 
where he called at several cities, he had an 
interesting experience at Marburg. On the roll 
of the matriculated students of the university, 



110 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

under the date of July 25, 1586, is Bruno's 
name, accompanied with the following note by 
the Rector: ''When the right of publicly 
teaching philosophy was denied him by me, 
with the consent of the faculty of philosophy, 
for weighty reasons, he blazed out, grossly 
insulting me in my own house, protesting I 
was acting against the law of nations, the cus- 
toms of all the universities of Germany, and 
all the schools of humanity. He refused then 
to become a member of the university, — ^his fee 
was readily returned, and his name accordingly 
erased from the album of the university by 
me.'' At a later period the name of Bruno 
could still be made out under the heavy line 
drawn across it by the rector. A subsequent 
rector, finding Bruno more famous, rewrote the 
name above the line, and crossed out, ''with the 
consent of the faculty of philosophy" in the 
rector 's note. 

Bruno went to Wittenburg, where the Luth- 
erans were in power, and obtained permission 
to lecture on the condition of not conflicting 
with their religion. For two years he ex- 
pounded Aristotle's Organon and taught his 
own Art of Memory. Wittenburg gave him a 
period of peace equalled only by Paris and Lon- 
don. The grateful Italian responded in the 



BRUNO THE WANDERER 111 

dedication of one of his books on memory: 
*' Because I was a pupil in the temple of the 
Muses, you thought me worthy of the kindliest 
welcome, enrolled me in the album, of your 
academy, and gave me a place in a body of 
men so noble and learned that I could not fail 
to see in you neither a private school nor an 
exclusive conventicle, but as becomes the 
Athens of Germany, a true university." 
Among other books published here was the one 
intended, '*To enable one to dispute promptly 
and copiously on any subject proposed," in 
which art he was unequalled. 

From Wittenburg, he was tempted to Prague, 
in Bohemia, by the reputation of Emperor Ru- 
dolf II, as a patron of learning. He found the 
Emperor almost entirely absorbed in astrology, 
which Tycho Brahe and Kepler turned to the 
advantage of astronomy. Rudolf recognized 
the Nolan's powers to the extent of giving 
three hundred dollars, and he resumed his 
travels, calling at Helmstadt, on his way to 
Frankfort. Frankfort was the last of the 
cities he visited which was able to keep him 
from the clutches of the Roman Inquisition. 



CHAPTER VII 

BRUNO THE MARTYR 

AT FRANKFORT the incidents occurred 
which led to the tragic close of his 
eventful career. In those days Frank- 
fort was the world-center for books, and every 
half year printers and booksellers came to 
Frankfort to see the world's new books and 
stock their houses. There came two booksellers 
from Venice, Ciotto and Bertano, who stayed 
at the monastery, where they met Bruno. After 
their return to Venice, Ciotto received a call 
at his book shop from a young Venetian noble- 
man, Mocenigo, who was destined to achieve a 
reputation paralleled only by Judas Iscariot. 
Mocenigo inquired for a book by Bruno, and 
asked Ciotto if he knew the author and where 
he might be found ? On being told that Bruno 
was in Frankfort, he requested to know if 
Ciotto thought he could be persuaded to come 
to Venice, to teach him the secrets of memory, 
and secrets of magic, the possession of which 
were credited to Bruno by popular ignorance. 
Ciotto thought he might, and a few days later 
Mocenigo gave him a letter for Bruno, which 
was eventually delivered. 

112 



BRUNO THE MARTYR 113 

Bruno 's dramatic career and the noble cour- 
age of his closing years has attracted several 
biographers and much sympathetic investiga- 
tion, and all have been amazed at the readiness 
which Bruno seems to have accepted the peril- 
ous offer of Mocenigo. The same astonishment 
seems to have possessed his contemporaries. 
On his way to Venice he made a brief stay at 
Padua, and while there, one of his friends, 
Michael Forgacz, received a letter from Valens 
Havekenthal, which contained the following: 
*'Tell me one thing more: Giordano Bruno, 
whom you knew at Wittenburg, the Nolan, is 
said to be living just now among you at Padua. 
Is it really so ? What sort of a man is this that 
he entered Italy, which he left an exile, as he 
used himself to confess ? I wonder, I wonder, I 
cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have 
it on good authority. You shall tell me whether 
it is true or false.'' A wandering life was 
probably losing its charm, and he was forty- 
three years old. In the sixteenth century it 
was less agreeable than now to be a foreigner, 
and one clew to his longing for home may be 
found in his own accounts of the kickings and 
beatings which were given to foreigners in the 
English streets on the slightest pretext. Again, 
he was constantly seeking, and apparently ex- 



114 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

pecting to find, some basis of compromise with 
the church, by which he would be able to peace- 
fully pass his last days on his native soil. He 
probably felt himself a part of the church, seek- 
ing reforms from within, rather than an enemy 
attacking it from without, for he surely did 
not realize how fierce had been some of his de- 
nunciations. Finally, he regarded Mocenigo as 
a powerful noble, able and willing to give him 
the protection he had fully pledged. Whatever 
may have been back of his decision, the event 
proved that he made a costly blunder when he 
placed himself within reach of the Holy Office. 

Whether Mocenigo was merely a shallow- 
brained fool, or a designing scoundrel, cannot 
be definitely decided, but the evidence indicates 
that he was both. It was not long before he 
went whining to Ciotto about Bruno, *'who 
promised to teach me much, and has had clothes 
and money in plenty from me, but I cannot 
bring him to a point, and fear he may not be 
quite honest/' The pitiful patrician was 
greatly disappointed that his tutor had not 
furnished him those secrets of magic, which 
were to give him power over nature and man. 
He requested Ciotto, when he next visited the 
Frankfort book-market, to inquire about 
Bruno's reputation. Ciotto returned with the 



BRUNO THE MARTYR 115 

unfavorable report that in Frankfort, the Ital- 
ian was held to be a man of no religion. Triv- 
ial as this charge would be in our day, it was a 
very serious accusation in the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Mocenigo then informed Giotto, *'I, too, 
have my doubts of him, but I will see how much 
I can get of what he promised me, so as not 
lose entirely what I have paid him, and then I 
will give him up to the judgment of the Holy 
Office. ' ' Holy Office, was the official title of 
that monstrous institution, the inquisition. 

Bruno seems to have been still unaware of 
his danger, for he walked still further into the 
trap, — ^he gave up his lodgings, from whence he 
might have fled the country unobserved, and 
went to live in Mocenigo 's house. Giotto, whose 
testimony before the inquisition was favorable 
to Bruno, introduced him to Andrea Morosini, 
an educated and liberal nobleman, whose house 
was a frequent meeting-place for a group of 
scholarly Venetians. Testifying before the in- 
quisition, Morosini said: *' Several gentlemen 
meet there, prelates among them, for entertain- 
ment, discoursing of literature, and principally 
of philosophy; thither Bruno came several 
times, and talked of several things, as is the 
custom ; but there was never a sign that he held 
any opinions against the faith, and so far as I 



116 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

am concerned, I have always thought him a 
Catholic, and had I had the least suspicion of 
the contrary I should not have permitted him 
to enter my house.'' Mclntyre, to whom this 
narrative is greatly indebted, points out that 
the last sentence does not present Morosini's 
real views. It does, however, indicate his 
knowledge of the seriousness of being in the 
disfavor of the Holy Office. These meetings 
evidently misled Bruno as to the safety of free 
expression of opinion in the Venetian Republic, 
which was really liberal and powerful, and 
jealous in the protection of the rights of its citi- 
zens against the encroachments of Rome. 
Bruno, moreover, seems to have strangely over- 
looked the important fact that he was not a 
Venetian, but a native of Italy. He was still 
nursing his delusion that he might secure such 
a reconciliation with the church as would per- 
mit him to live quietly in Rome as a lecturer 
and man of letters. He was parleying to this 
end with several Venetian priests, especially 
Father Domenico, who seems to have been 
sympathetic, and who gave favorable testi- 
mony as to these discussions at the trial. In 
this project, he had the worthless promise of 
aid from Mocenigo. 
At last, when too late, Bruno observed the 



BRUNO THE MARTYR 117 

gathering cloud and formed a plan of escape. 
He pretended a desire to go to Frankfort to get 
some books printed, but made the mistake of 
bidding Mocenigo goodby. It is very doubt- 
ful, however, whether he would have been able 
to escape in any event. On the night set for 
his departure, Mocenigo, with five or six gon- 
doliers, seized him, and locked him in an attic. 
He was then turned over to the Holy Office, 
with a mass of grotesque charges about magic, 
which were chiefly a reflection of Mocenigo 's 
own superstitions. Of a second denunciation 
by Mocenigo, Mclntyre says, ^ ' there is no more 
pitiful self -revelation of meanness and hypocrisy 
extant." The description of the prisoner was, 
'*A man of ordinary stature, with chestnut 
brown beard, of the age and appearance of 
forty years. ' ' 

At the request of the Father inquisitor, 
Mocenigo made a still further deposition in 
which he accused Bruno of saying that it was 
a mistake to allow the friars to remain so rich 
in Venice ; they should do as in France, where 
the nobles enjoyed the revenues of the monas- 
teries, the friars living on soup, as befitted 
such ''asses." About the same time Bertano, 
the book-seller, gave evidence that he recalled 
having heard the prior of the Carmelite mon- 



118 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

astery at Frankfort say of Bruno, that he spent 
most of his time in writing, and went about 
dreaming dreams and meditating new things, 
that he had a fine mind and knowledge of let- 
ters, and was a universal man, but that he had 
no religion so far as the prior knew. At these 
hearings Bruno gave the account of his travels 
which furnishes the information summarized in 
the preceeding pages. 

The prisoner gave his judges a statement of 
his creed, one passage of which is enough to 
show its contrast to the puerile superstitions 
of the time : '^I believe in an infinite universe, 
the effect of the infinite divine potency, because 
it has seemed to me unworthy of the divine 
goodness and power to create a finite world, 
when able to produce besides it another and 
infinite; so that I have declared that 
there are endless particular worlds similar to 
this of the Earth ; with Pythagoras I regard it 
as a star, and similar to it are the moon, the 
planets, and other stars, which are infinite, and 
all these bodies are worlds, and without num- 
ber, constituting the infinite all in an infinite 
space." This noble concept of the immensity 
of the universe not only sounded strangely to 
the people of his day, but it was bitterly of- 
fensive to the priestly ear. It was in violent 



BRUNO THE MAETYR 119 

conflict with the priestly notion that this earth 
was so pre-eminently important, that the cre- 
ator had died for the salvation of its in- 
habitants. 

The next development in the drama was the 
struggle for the extradition of the prisoner to 
Rome. There '^The Sacred Congregation of 
the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office/' was 
waiting impatiently for the opportunity to 
wreak its vengeance on the helpless prophet of 
modern thought. The appeal was made to the 
Doge and Senators, and the Father Inquisitor 
urged a decision, informing them that a vessel 
was ready to set out. The reply of the Senate 
was that *'the matter being of moment, and de- 
serving consideration, and the occupations of 
the State being many and weighty, they could 
not at that time come to a decision, and his 
Reverence might for the present let the vessel 
sail.'' Three days before Christmas, the Papal 
Nuncio appeared before the Senate, and 
pleaded that Bruno was a Neapolitan, and not a 
subject of the Venetian Republic. On the sev- 
enth of January the plea was resumed by the 
procurator, Contarini, who said, '^his faults 
were extremely grave in respect of heresies, 
although in other respects one of the most 
excellent and rarest natures, and of exquisite 



120 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

learning and knowledge.'' The political situa- 
tion of the moment was fatal to Bruno. It was 
considered desirable to conciliate the Pope, and 
on the same day it was decreed by the Senate 
that, *'to gratify the Pope, the said Giordano 
Bruno be remitted to the Tribunal of the In- 
quisition at Rome, being consigned to Mon- 
signor the Nuncio that he may be sent in what 
custody and by what means his Reverend 
Lordship thinks best ; that the Nuncio be noti- 
fied of this, and that our Ambassador at Rome 
be also advised thereof to represent it to his 
Holiness as a mark of the continued readiness 
of the Republic to do what is pleasing to him." 
Bruno, the ill-starred knight-errant of phil- 
osophy, entered the Roman prison of the In- 
quisition on the 27th of February, 1593, and 
from that moment his fate was sealed. 

Though the Inquisition was notoriously quick 
to strike its victims, Bruno, for reasons which 
will probably never be known, remained in its 
dungeons for the next six years. The use of 
torture was the rule, and there is not the 
slightest reason for believing that Bruno es- 
caped. In 1849 an opportunity was given to 
study the records in the Vatican; the student 
began at 1600, the year of Bruno's death and 
worked back to November, 1598, when the per- 



BEUNO THE MARTYE 121 

mission was withdrawn, and the world had to 
be satisfied with the assertion that there were 
no more documents, though it is difficult to 
understand, if that were really the case, why 
the investigator was not allowed to convince 
himself. 

One wonders if human society will ever 
again sink to the point of treating a man as 
worse than a murderer because he disagrees 
with a church on such points as (1) the dis- 
tinctions of the persons in God; (2) the incar- 
nation of the "Word; (3) the nature of the Holy 
Spirit; (4) the Divinity of Christ, which were 
the first and most important half of the sub- 
jects on which Bruno was charged with heresy. 
There is also something utterly disgusting in 
the urging of the prisoner to long discussions 
of these crack-brained questions, when all the 
parties to the pitiful proceedings knew that, 
no matter what he said, he was to be burned 
alive at the end of the mock-debate. 

It has been held that Bruno twisted and 
turned before the Venetian Tribunal, in his 
efforts to escape the hungry maw of the Holy 
Office, but he can hardly be blamed when it is 
remembered that he knew of the fiendish de- 
vices for producing unendurable agony, ruth- 
lessly applied until men swooned from pain, 



122 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

by inhuman monsters whose souls were seared 
by the love of God. All writers are agreed 
that from the moment he was thrown into the 
Roman prison, and realized his inevitable fate, 
his courage was unwavering and magnificent. 
He defied his Roman inquisitors, and they re- 
ported him as saying, that he neither ought nor 
will recant, that he has nothing to recant, no 
matter for recantation, does not know what he 
ought to recant." 

Prominent among his inquisitors was the 
fanatical San Severin, who stands forth in his- 
tory as the man who declared the drenching of 
Parisian streets with Protestant blood on St. 
Bartholomew 's Eve, as * ' a glorious day, a day 
of joy for Catholics." The Tribunal appointed 
Hippolyte Maria, general of the Dominican or- 
der, and Paul of Mirandula, the vicar, 'Ho deal 
with Bruno, show him what had to be abjured, 
that he might confess his errors, amend his 
ways, and agree to abjure; and should try to 
bring him to the point as soon as possible." 
They reported their efforts fruitless, as Bruno 
stood firm. 

At the meeting of January 20th, 1600, the 
Pope being present, and refusing to read a 
memorial from Bruno, it was decreed, ''that 
sentence be passed, and that the said Friar 



I 



BRUNO THE MARTYR 123 

Giordano be handed over to the secular author- 
ity. ' ' The decree was carried out on the eighth 
of February, when he was placed in the hands 
of the Governor of Rome, with the usual recom- 
mendation that he be punished ''with as great 
clemency as possible, and without effusion of 
blood,'' which was the euphemistic and hy- 
pocritical formula for burning at the stake. 

For a long time the only evidence of the 
burning of Bruno was a letter by Gaspar 
Schopp, and Catholic writers were confident in 
their assertions that it never occurred. Later 
discoveries of documents not then known to be 
in existence, have abolished this line of defense, 
except for a few irresponsible scribes, who rely 
upon the dense ignorance of their readers. 
Schopp 's letter, then denounced as a forgery, 
but now admitted to be genuine, was written 
from Rome to Conrad Rittershausen. Schopp 
had renounced Protestantism, embraced Cath- 
olicism, and journeyed to Rome in search of 
his reward. He was not disappointed, as he 
was quickly admitted to the Pope's favor, 
made a knight of St. Peter, and a count of the 
Sacred Palace. His letter relates how Bruno's 
sentence charged him with the damnatory 
crime of ''early doubts concerning and ulti- 
mate denial of the Transubstantiation, and of 



124 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

the virgin conception, and cited as among the 
* horrible absurdities' of his Latin writings, 
his doctrine of the infinite number of worlds. 
The one redeeming feature of the letter is its 
record of Bruno's reply to his judges: 
^Greater perhaps is your fear in pronouncing 
my sentence than mine in hearing it.' " Schopp 
was present at the burning, and tells how 
Bruno turned his eyes angrily away from the 
crucifix held before him, and adds, ''he was 
burned and perished miserably, and is gone to 
tell, I suppose, in those other worlds of his 
fancy, how the blasphemous and impious are 
dealt with by the Romans." ''It is pleasant 
to know," says Mclntyre, "that when Lord 
Digby was English Ambassador to Spain he 
caused Gaspard Schopp to be horse-whipped." 
The Count of Ventimiglia, one of Bruno's 
pupils, was also present at the burning. The 
*'Avvisi" and the "Ritorni" which served as 
the Roman newspapers of the time, have been 
unearthed, and both contain accounts of the ex- 
ecution, one describing him as a Friar of St. 
Dominic, of Nola, burnt alive in the Campo di 
Fiori, an obstinate heretic, with his tongue 
tied. This latter detail was a common feature 
of the burnings of heretics, as it prevented the 



BRUNO THE MAETYR 125 

crowd from hearing the victims heap their 
curses on the Church. 

The last possible doubt as to the burning of 
Bruno was dispelled by the discovery of the 
report of the Company of St. John, the Be- 
headed. This organization had for its function, 
the attendance upon heretics in their last hours 
and death. By a fine piece of sarcasm, they 
were sometimes called the Company of Mercy, 
for about all they did was to annoy the victims 
with urgent requests to repent of their sins, 
the priests thrusting images and crucifixes in 
their faces while the fire was being started. It 
is recorded that they were not above co-operat- 
ing with the executioner in the use of cruel de- 
vices to compel the victim to appear to be kiss- 
ing the cross when they were really trying to 
avoid it. Their Official Report of the burning 
of Europe's noblest thinker gives a realistic 
and vivid picture of the event : 

*'At the second hour of the night it was in- 
timated to the Company that an impenitent was 
to be executed in the morning ; so at the sixth 
hour the comforters and the chaplain met at 
St. Ursula, and went to the prison of the 
Tower of Nona. After the customary prayers 
in the chapel there was consigned to them the 
under mentioned condemned to death, viz.: 



126 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Giordana, son of the late Giovanni Bruno, an 
Apostate Friar of Nola in the kingdom, an im- 
penitent heretic . With all charity our brethren 
exhorted him to repent, and there were called 
two Fathers of St. Dominic, two of the Society 
of Jesus, two of the new Church, and one of 
St. Jerome, who, with all affection and much 
learning, showed him his error, but he re- 
mained to the end in his accursed obstinacy, 
his brain and intellect seething with a thousand 
errors and vanities. So, persevering in his ob- 
stinacy, he was led by the servants of justice 
to the Campo dei Fiori, there stripped, bound 
to a stake, and burned alive, attended always 
by our Company chanting the litanies, the com- 
forters exhorting him up to the last point to 
abandon his obstinacy, but in it finally he 
ended his miserable, unhappy life." 

Thus, on the seventeenth day of February, 
of the year 1600, in the flower market of Rome, 
amid the dismal chanting of monks, the great- 
est of the Italians passed from the earth, his 
ashes scattered by the winds, as his sublime 
doctrine of the infinite number of worlds, 
spread among the minds of men. In the his- 
toric struggle between science and superstition, 
for the moment, the cowled army was tri- 
umphant, but posterity has reversed the ver- 



BRUNO THE MARTYR 127 

diet, and today the Church is suppliant at the 
bar of civilization, begging men to forget her 
medieval murders. 

On the ninth day of June, in the year 1889, 
in the same flower market, with the conspicu- 
ous absence of priests, there gathered a vast 
concourse of thirty thousand men and women, 
representing every civilized country. With 
bared heads they witnessed the unveiling of a 
magnificent statue of the martyred Bruno, con- 
tributed as a monument of his final triumph by 
the freemen of the world. 



CHAPTER VIII 

GALILEO TO 1616 

THIRTY-SIX years before the prophet of 
modern science was burned, the man 
who was destined to be the greatest of 
its early exponents was born. On the 18th of 
February, 1564, there was a very important 
addition to the family of Vincenzo Galileo, 
which, at the time, was visiting at Pisa, fa- 
mous for its leaning tower. Presently the fam- 
ily returned to Florence, and there the boy 
grew up and received the beginnings of his 
education. He was instructed in the classics, 
as became the son of a nobleman, but as the 
father had no property and but a small in- 
come, he was to be denied a professional ca- 
reer, and devote himself to the honorable and 
lucrative occupation of a cloth dealer. 

The pupil learned his early lessons so rapidly 
that his father changed his plan from the dis- 
tribution of fabrics to the practice of medicine, 
considered to be the most remunerative of the 
sciences. At seventeen he was entered at the 
University of Pisa, and it was here that he 
gave the first indication of a genius that was 
to leave its impress on the world to the end 
of time. When he was kneeling in the Ca- 

128 



GALILEO TO 1616 129 

thedral, and supposed to be deep in prayer, 
he really had his eye fixed on Maestro Pos- 
senti's beautiful lamp swinging in the arch- 
way to better distribute the light. He dis- 
covered by feeling his pulse, that while the 
length of the lamp^s swing became shorter, the 
time consumed by each swing remained the 
same. The pendulum being thus discovered, it 
was a short step to clocks, and the young 
observer's fame began to spread; through 
Europe. 

Then something happened to turn his atten- 
tion away from medicine. The Court of 
Tuscany came to Pisa, and every morning while 
Ricci, the governor of the pages, was giving 
them their morning lesson in mathematics, 
young Galileo listened eagerly from a hiding 
place in the door-way. Finally, in his eager- 
ness, he revealed himself to the astonished 
teacher, and asked the privilege of further 
instruction, which was quickly granted. He 
secured his father's permission to turn from 
medicine to physics, of which science he is the 
universally recognized founder. He failed to 
secure one of the forty free places for poor 
students, because of his opposition to the par- 
alyzing authority of Aristotle, and had to go 
home without his degree. His talents having 



130 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

already attracted the notice of learned men, 
through the influence of Riccoboni, Marquis 
and mathematician, he secured the vacant po- 
sition of professor of mathematics at the Uni- 
versity of Pisa. The economic unwisdom of 
his last change of calling appears in his salary 
of sixty scudi a year, whereas the professor 
of medicine in the same institution received 
two thousand. 

He found it impossible to repress his oppo- 
sition to the uncritical worship of Aristotle, 
which had caused so many of the misfortunes 
of Bruno. Varchi in 1544, and Benedetti in 
1563, had denied Aristotle's proposition that 
the rate at which a body falls depends on its 
weight, and had supported their denials by 
clever reasoning, but Galileo was the first to 
anticipate the methods of modern science, by 
putting it to the test of experiment. One morn- 
ing, before the assembled university, he as- 
cended the famous tower of Pisa, which leaned 
over as if for the purpose of the experiment, 
which was the most important event in its 
history. Aristotle had said that a ten pound 
ball would fall ten times faster than a one 
pound ball. To put the demonstration beyond 
dispute, Galileo dropped a one pound ball, and 
a one hundred pound ball, at the same instant, 



GALILEO TO 1616 131 

and the great assemblage saw them start and 
strike the ground together. Some were con- 
vinced, others preferred the authority of the 
Aristotelian text to the evidence of their own 
senses, and many did not dare to admit their 
conversion. "While the creator of modern phy- 
sics had given the almost divine authority of 
the misused Greek philosopher a mortal 
wound, the only immediate result to himself 
was to insure his being driven from the uni- 
versity. This was accomplished through his 
impolitic condemnation of an invention of a 
distant relative of the Grand Duke, for clean- 
ing out the harbor of Leghorn. It did not help 
Galileo that he had been commissioned to ex- 
amine the machine, or that experiment con- 
firmed his verdict. 

Fortunately, his dismissal turned to his ad- 
vantage, for the learned Riccaboni came again 
to the rescue, and he was engaged for six years 
by the Republic of Venice, as professor of 
mathematics in the University of Padua. He 
arrived at Padua, to take up his new duties, a 
few months after Bruno had left on his fate- 
ful journey to Venice. Though only twenty- 
eight years old, he began, almost immediately, 
to reap the reward of his great ability. He at- 
tracted so many pupils, including a number 



132 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

of distinguislied persons, from all over Europe, 
that no lecture hall in Padua was large enough 
to hold them. The Senate of the Republic was 
quick to recognize the value of his services; 
they treated him generously and held him in 
high regard. He accompanied his lectures 
with many curious demonstrations, invented 
many machines of great value to the Republic, 
and invented a heat indicator — a thermoscope 
— ^which led to the thermometer, but was not 
itself a thermometer, as claimed by some of 
his over-zealous biographers. Near the close 
of his six years he wrote to Kepler, Germany's 
foremost astronomer: '*I count myself happy, 
in the search after truth, to have so great 
an ally as yourself. ... I have been for 
many years an adherent of the Copernican sys- 
tem, and it explains to me the causes of many 
of the appearances of nature which are quite 
unintelligible on the commonly accepted hy- 
pothesis. I have collected many arguments for 
the purpose of refuting the latter. ... I 
should certainly venture to publish my specula- 
tions if there was more people like you. But 
this not being the case, I refrain from the 
undertaking. ' ' 

At the close of his six years he was eagerly 
re-engaged for a similar term, his annual sal- 



GALILEO TO 1616 133 

ary being steadily raised from 18 to 400 
zecchini — $90 to $2,000. During his second 
term he made his epoch-creating telescope. 
Galileo himself contradicts those over-enthusi- 
astic eulogists, who have claimed that his tele- 
scope was the first. He says that he had heard 
that a Dutchman had made an instrument, by 
means of which distant objects were brought 
nearer, and could be seen very plainly. The 
Dutchman was Lippershey. With no further 
information he quickly succeeded in making 
one of his own, and by further experiment, 
having '^ spared neither expense nor labor,'' he 
finally obtained an instrument which brought 
an object more than thirty times nearer. This 
astonishing achievement was destined to lead 
to serious trouble. The Church did not con- 
cern itself with the Copernican conception of 
the universe, so long as it could be regarded as 
an unproved and unprovable phantasm. 
The wide liberty allowed in the discussions of 
the scholastic philosophy was due to its con- 
clusions being as vaporous as the processes by 
which they were reached. The achievements 
of the telescope were definite, and their impli- 
cations unmistakable. The seven known stars 
of the Pleiades rose to thirty-six, and the seven 
of Orion were increased by five hundred. The 



134 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

milky way ceased to be a luminous mist, and 
became a girdle composed of millions of indi- 
vidual stars. The planets appeared as disks, 
while the stars remained, as they still remain 
in the largest telescopes, and, because of their 
enormous distance, always must remain, mere 
points of light. There was a revelation which 
set all Europe by the ears when Galileo turned 
his crude telescope on the mighty Jupiter. 
Four specks of light, always in a straight line, 
because they circle the planet in the same plane, 
mnist for a certainty be Jupiter's moons. 

And so the long cherished dogma of the 
earth's supremacy vanished before the astron- 
omer's ardent gaze; the earth was not even 
monarch of the planets, for here was a king 
with four courtiers to the earth's one. In our 
day it is impossible to realize the storm which 
broke forth with this announcement. The 
ignorant champions of the Holy Faith donned 
their armor and came forth to battle, with a 
confidence born of their inability to under- 
stand. Even the learned Clavius at Rome, said 
that **he laughed at the pretended satellites of 
Jupiter ; you must construct a telescope which 
would first make them and then show them." 
"With such an illustrious example, the Aris- 
totelians were not slow to assert that the tele- 



GALILEO TO 1616 135 

scope was constructed to show things that did 
not exist, although Galileo offered 10,000 scudi 
to anyone who could construct such an instru- 
ment. Julius Libri violenty opposed, but re- 
fused to look through the telescope, and when 
he died, Galileo, in a letter he was writing at 
the time, said that as Libri was never willing 
to look at Jupiter's moons from the earth, he 
might perhaps see them on his way to heaven. 

Not only did Jupiter overthrow the ancient 
and current doctrine that the earth was the 
only center of motion, but the Peripatetic fa- 
natics were further discredited when the tele- 
scope was turned on the sun and moon. Galileo 
declared the moon to have an irregular sur- 
face, while the apparently even face of the sun 
was disfigured by dark spots which changed 
their form and position, all of which con- 
tradicted the Aristotelian idea that all the 
heavenly bodies were ^'perfect and immutable." 
The spots on the sun had been previously ob- 
served with the naked eye, but had been 
explained as the passing of Mercury before the 
sun. When Galileo presented a telescope to 
the Venetian Senate, he was made professor 
for life at a salary of one thousand florins. 

We now reach a crisis in the astronomer's 
career. He gradually developed the fixed idea 



136 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

of returning to Italy. This was an exact coun- 
terpart of the mistake made by Bruno when he 
left Frankfort for Venice. Under no circum- 
stances would the Senate, which had sacrificed 
Bruno to diplomacy, have given up its famous 
professor, had he remained in their service. 
The relations of the two governments had en- 
tirely changed. Six years after the burning of 
Bruno Pope Paul V. had issued an interdict 
against the Eepublic, which had replied by 
driving the Jesuit Fathers from the soil of 
Venice ''for ever,'' and Rome had again coun- 
tered by the excommunication of the Doge 
and Senate. Had all this happened before 1593, 
the Pope would have begged in vain for Bruno, 
though for him the Venetians had felt no such 
obligations as for Galileo. Galileo began to 
feel a great desire to give his mass of accu- 
mulating knowledge the permanence of books, 
but was hindered by having his time absorbed 
in the delivery of lectures. His letters of this 
period express his desire for a salaried posi- 
tion, free from academic duties, thus giving the 
leisure for the production of his contemplated 
books. He felt this salaried leisure could only 
be found in the employ of some wealthy patron 
of science. One of his letters says: ''It would 
not be suitable to receive a salary from a free 



GALILEO TO 1616 137 

state, without serving the public for it ; because 
if you derive benefit from the public, you have 
the public to please, and not a mere private 
person." In this dilemma, he turned to the 
Grand Duke of his native kingdom, Tuscany. 
As this looked like ingratitude to the Repub- 
lic, he kept the negotiations wth the Grand 
Duke a secret from Venice until they were 
completed and irrevocable. The Grand Duke 
Cosmo II. gave him the position of first philos- 
opher to the University of Pisa, at a salary of 
one thousand Florentine scudi, with no obliga- 
tion to live at Pisa or to deliver lectures. In 
the September of 1610, Galileo departed from 
Padua. His friend Sagredo was in the East, 
on business of the Republic, at the time, and 
did not return to Padua until the following 
spring. Immediately on his return, he wrote 
to Galileo, expressing his amazement and re- 
gret at finding Galileo gone, and his fears for 
his safety away from the protection of the 
free Republic, adding that as he was *' con- 
vinced that as Galileo could not regain what 
he had lost, he would take good care to hold 
fast what he had gained." From which it 
appears that the disappointment of the Vene- 
tians over Galileo's leaving, was sufficiently 
bitter to make his return impossible. 



138 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

For a time Galileo was greatly honored in 
Italy, but the priests were powerful there, and 
the troubles feared for him by his friends soon 
appeared. Destiny had chosen him as the 
great protagonist of the new system of the uni- 
verse, and the black robed defenders of the 
ancient faith were mustering their forces for 
the struggle. It was to be Ptolemy against 
Copernicus, and the intellect of Europe was, if 
possible, to be kept in bondage to the blunders 
of ancient science, petrified forever in the name 
of religion. Only a month after his arrival in 
Florence, he dealt the geo-centric — earth-cen- 
ter — theory a heavy blow. It had been pointed 
out to Copernicus that if Ptolemy was wrong, 
and he right, Venus should show phases like 
the moon. The founder of modern astronomy 
had replied: *'You are right; I know not what 
to say; but God is good, and will in time find 
an answer to this objection." It was for Gali- 
leo's telescope to furnish the answer; the only 
difficulty had been that the phases of Venus 
were beyond the reach of the naked eye, for 
they were plainly visible even in Galileo's 
crude instrument. 

Soon after this Galileo discovered the spots 
on the sun, and from their regular motion 
across its surface, announced that the sun 



GALILEO TO 1616 139 

turned on its axis. As this was in conflict with 
the accepted system, it was received ^'frown- 
ingly.'' Professor Andrew Dickson White 
says: ^'Monsignor Elci, head of the University 
or Pisa, forbade the astronomer Castelli to men- 
tion these spots to his students. Father 
Busaeus, at the University of Innspruck, for- 
bade the astronomer Scheiner, who had also 
discovered the spots and proposed a safe ex- 
planation of them, to allow the new discovery 
to be known there. At the college of Douay 
and the University of Louvain this discovery 
was expressly placed under the ban, and this 
became the general rule among the Catholic 
universities and colleges of Europe." 

In all the scientific controversies Galileo was 
easily victorious, and his enemies shrewdly per- 
ceived that the theological armory would fur- 
nish their most effective weapons against him. 
A week before Christmas, 1611, he received a 
letter from his friend Cigoli, the painter, which 
convinced him he was living in a fool 's paradise 
of fancied security. Cigoli gave him the de- 
tails of the conferences of high ecclesiastics, 
held in the palace of the Archbishop of Tus- 
cany at Florence, where means to accomplish 
his ruin were the sole topics of discussion. Pro- 
fessor White says : ^'Pope Paul V. while petting 



140 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Galileo and inviting him as tlie greatest astron- 
omer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly- 
moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evi- 
dence against the astronomer." A fanatical 
young monk, Sizy, opened the theological bat- 
tery by asserting, in his book published at 
Venice, 1611, that the existence of the moons of 
Jupiter was incompatible with the doctrines of 
Holy Scripture. Father Caccini, the Dominican 
monk, turned punster, and preached a sermon 
from the text, *'Ye men of Galilee, why stand 
ye gazing up into heaven. ' ' Father Lorini, pro- 
fessor of ecclesiastical history at Florence, de- 
scribed by the German scholar Gebler, as *'a 
ringleader of the base intrigues against Gali- 
leo,'' declared that the view of 'Hhis Ipernic, 
or whatever his name might be,'' appeared to 
be contrary to Holy Scripture. Of him Galileo 
wrote to Prince Cesi, '* The good man is so well 
acquainted with the author of these doctrines 
that he calls him Ipernic. You see how and by 
whom poor philosophy suffers." The Arch- 
bishop of Florence solemnly denounced Gali- 
leo's doctrines as unscriptural. Father Lecazre 
declared they ''cast suspicion on the doctrine 
of the incarnation." 

The struggle grew fiercer and Professor 
White says: ''There were intrigues and coun- 



GALILEO TO 1616 141 

ter-intrigues, plots and counter-plots, lying 
and spying; and in the thickest of this seeth- 
ing mass of priests, bishops, archbishops, and 
cardinals, appear two popes, Paul V. and Urban 
VIII." While Galileo took the course which 
seemed most natural under the circumstances, 
he really did the most dangerous thing possi- 
ble. He undertook to show that the new 
astronomy did not necessarily contradict the 
Scriptures. This had the unexpected effect of 
increasing the seriousness of his offence, as it 
was bitterly received by the priests, as an in- 
vasion of their functions as the sole interpreters 
of Holy Writ. Galileo made this ill-starred 
defence in a long letter to his friend and pupil 
Castelli. Castelli had been present at a bril- 
liant gathering at the Grand Duke's apart- 
ments. Boscaglia, one of Galileo's enemies, had 
maliciously interjected the Bible into a discus- 
sion of Galileo's theories, and Castelli had felt 
obliged to champion the cause of his absent 
friend. He reported to Galileo that he had si- 
lenced all objectors except the dowager Grand 
Duchess Christine. It was to provide his col- 
league with the arguments with which to sat- 
isfy even the aged Duchess, that Galileo wrote 
the now historic letter to Castelli. The Church 
has been glad to avail itself of the very defence 



142 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

which Galileo offered for it in the 17th century, 
but they held it as one of his most serious 
crimes at the time. 

The following passage will given an idea of 
the reasoning of the famous letter : * * Since two 
truths can obviously never contradict each oth- 
er, it is the part of wise interpreters of Holy 
Scripture to take the pains to find out the real 
meaning of its statements, in accordance with 
the conclusions regarding nature which are 
quite certain, either from the clear evidence of 
sense or from necessary demonstration. As 
therefore the Bible, although dictated by the 
Holy Spirit, admits, from the reasons given 
above, in many passages of an interpretation 
other than the literal one; and as, more- 
over, we cannot maintain with certainty 
that all interpreters are inspired by God, 
I think it would be the part of wisdom 
not to allow any one to apply passages of 
Scripture in such a way as to force them to 
support, as true, conclusions concerning nature 
the contrary of which may afterwards be re- 
vealed by the evidence of our senses or by 
necessary demonstration/' 

Castelli saw no harm in the sage advice of 
this letter, and spread it about by means of 
numerous copies. Father Lorini obtained a 



GALILEO TO 1616 143 

copy and presented it as a part of the evidence, 
when he acquired the doubtful honor of being 
the first to accuse Galileo to the inquisition. 
The inquisiton required the original letter, and 
ordered the Archbishop of Pisa to obtain it *'in 
a skillful manner. ' ' When Castelli visited Pisa 
a few days later, the Archbishop suggested 
that he thought he could show where Galileo 
was mistaken if only he could see the original 
letter. Fortunately Castelli had already re- 
turned the original to the author. When Cas- 
telli explained to Galileo, and asked for the let- 
ter again to show to the Archbishop the au- 
thor's suspicions were aroused and the Arch- 
bishop 's subsequent intrigues were of no avail. 
Galileo then increased the letter into a long 
and careful statement of his whole position, to 
protect himself against the many misrepresen- 
tations of his enemies. These, he observed, were 
rapidly increasing, but he knew nothing of the 
cause — the secret proceedings of the inquisi- 
tion against him. It was in the enlarged edi- 
tion of the letter that he quoted the saying of 
Cardinal Baronius, that in inspiring the Bible : 
'^The Holy Spirit intended to teach us how to 
go to heaven, and not how the heavens go." 

It was now clear that trouble was brewing 
in Rome and Galileo concluded his wisest 



144 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

course would be to meet it there. He arrived 
in Rome to promote his cause, in December, 
1615. He seems to have been entirely success- 
ful so far as his personal affairs were con- 
cerned ; his many and powerful friends in Rome 
greatly aided him to escape the snares laid for 
him by his enemies. This accomplished, he 
was determined to secure a triumph for the 
theories of Copernicus. He was laboring under 
the delusion that the Roman Curia was open to 
be convinced by scientific evidence. He lec- 
tured at the houses of prominent Romans, en- 
thusiastically expounding the Copernican sys- 
tem, until the inquisition was aroused and de- 
termined to take action. This was done in the 
historically important proceedings of February 
25th and 26th, 1616. What was really done at 
this meeting of the Holy Office has been the 
subject of a controversy much too long for re- 
production here. The most reliable conclu- 
sions seem to be those of Cantor, Wohlwill, 
Gherardi, and especially of Karl von Gebler, 
who was permitted to make a German transla- 
tion of all the documents of the trial now in 
the archives of the Vatican. According to these 
authorities, Galileo was ordered to abandon his 
belief in the Copernican system, as that system 
was undoubtedly contradictory to the Holy 



GALILEO TO 1616 145 

Scriptures. The custom of the Church at this 
period shows that this did not prohibit Galileo, 
or anyone else, from explaining that system as 
a supposition or hypothesis, so long as it was 
not advanced as actually true. It is certain 
that Galileo acted at the time, and for the next 
sixteen years, on the assumption that this was 
the extent of their condemnation, and it may be 
safely assumed that the inquisition fully in- 
formed him as to its desires. Eealizing that 
any other course was hopeless, he agreed to 
cease teaching the Copernican system '^as 
true." 

Meanwhile Grand Duke Cosmo II., who was 
anxious about the welfare of his great philos- 
opher, was receiving disquiting letters from 
his Ambassador Guiccardini, who was urging 
that it was unwise for Galileo to remain longer 
in Rome, ''especially at a time when the ruler 
of the eternal city hates science and polite 
scholars, and cannot endure these innovations 
and subtleties." This portrait did no injustice 
to Pope Paul V. On March 5th the Congrega- 
tion of the Index issued its decree placing the 
writings of Copernicus on the Index of pro- 
hibited books. The Grand Duke, alarmed by 
these developments, issued the order for Ga- 
lileo's return. Accordingly, on May 23rd the 



146 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Secretary of State Picchena, wrote Galileo as 
follows : 

*'You have had enough of monkish perse- 
cutions, and know now what the flavor of them 
is. His Highness fears that your longer tar- 
riance at Rome might involve you in difficul- 
ties, and would therefore be glad if, as you 
have so far come honorably out of the affair, 
you would not tease the sleeping dog any more, 
and would return here as soon as possible. For 
there are rumors flying about which we do not 
like, and the monks are all powerful. ' ' Galileo 
complied at once with the wishes of the Grand 
Duke and on the 4th of June departed from 
Rome. 



CHAPTER IX 

TRIAL AND SENTENCE 

THE SEVEN years following 1616 were 
passed quietly by Galileo in the Villa 
Segni, near Florence. The inquisition 
had ordered changes to be made in the pro- 
hibited book of Copernicus, and Galileo waited 
for these changes as indications of the inten- 
tions of the Church. During this period he 
wrote no new books. He was hoping he might 
be allowed to freely express his real convic- 
tions and was unwilling to express them by 
subterfuge until that hope perished. His atti- 
tude of mind is revealed in a letter to the 
Archduke Leopold, which he sent with a copy 
of his treatise on the causes of the tides : 

*' With this I send a treatise on the causes of 
the tides, which I wrote rather more than two 
years ago at the suggestion of his Eminence 
Cardinal Orsini at Rome, at the time when the 
theologians were thinking of prohibiting Co- 
pernicus' book and the doctrine announced 
therein of the motion of the earth, which I 
then held to be true, until it pleased those gen- 
tlemen to prohibit the work, and to declare 
that opinion to be false and contrary to Scrip- 
ture. Now, knowing as I do, that it behooves 

147 



148 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

us to obey the decisions of the authorities, and 
to believe them, since they are guided by a 
higher insight than any to which my humble 
mind can of itself attain, I consider this trea- 
tise which I send you merely to be a poetical 
conceit or dream, and desire that your High- 
ness may take it as such, inasmuch as it is 
based on a double motion of the earth, and in- 
deed contains one of the arguments which I 
have adduced in confirmation of it." 

In 1616 an attack on Copernicus' system had 
been especially addressed to him by the law- 
yer Ingoli of Ravenna. To this Galileo did 
not dare to reply. In 1618 it was effectively 
answered in a book by Kepler, which was 
promptly placed on the Index of prohibited 
books. During this period, Galileo conducted 
a controversy with Father Grassi in which he 
greatly humiliated the Jesuit by the supe- 
riority of his wit and arguments. Father Grassi 
finally condescended to a reply of so scurrilous 
and contemptible a nature that it had to be 
published in Paris, as he was afraid to publish 
it in Rome, where Galileo was well known and 
much admired. When this discreditable work 
finally reached Rome it destroyed the influence 
of Father Grassi, who had been considered 
above such behavior. 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 149 

Galileo finally realized that it would be im- 
possible within the jurisdiction of the Roman 
Curia to publish any book which undisguisedly 
advocated the theories of Copernicus. Never- 
theless he was bent upon the production of a 
great book which would contain the result of 
his researches of fifty years. It is clear that 
he intended this from the beginning, no matter 
what subterfuges might have to be employed, 
to secure permission for its publication. The 
book was to deliver a great blow against 
Ptolemy and for Copernicus. As a method of 
disguise he fell back upon the Greek device of 
dialogues. This work is now known as one of 
the few epochmaking books of the world and 
had for its title '^Dialogues on the Two Princi- 
pal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and 
Copernican." The subject matter of the book 
is communicated through the mouths of three 
characters, Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicius. 
Salviati had been a pupil in Florence, and 
Sagredo a pupil at Padua and a Venetian sena- 
tor. Neither of these men were then living. 
Simplicius was the name of one of the well 
known commentators on Aristotle and for this 
reason was well fitted to his role of defending 
the Aristotelian antagonists of Copernicus. 



150 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

In the dialogues it was the role of Salviati 
to advocate the Copernican system ; Simplicius 
was to reply and to defend the Ptolemaic sys- 
tem, while Sagredo was to be a third and im- 
partial person anxious to learn. It is impos- 
sible to read the book without seeing the over- 
whelming victory of the Copernican theory. 
This victory was all the greater because Galileo 
placed in the mouth of Simplicius a more elo- 
quent and capable defense of his case than 
could have been offered by any of the protag- 
onists of that school. The arguments of Sal- 
viati are clear, forcible, and convincing and it 
is obvious that they represent the real convic- 
tions of Galileo. Salviati, however, always felt 
himself in the shadow of the inquisition and 
followed each powerful argument by urging 
that this was not presented as an actual truth, 
but as a chimera or a paradox. 

The book was finished at the close of 1629, 
and then began the long struggle to secure per- 
mission for its publication. Everything ap- 
peared favorable for this and Galileo appar- 
ently expected little difficulty. He had many 
and influential friends, although he had lost 
his powerful protector, the Grand Duke Cosmo 
II., who had been succeeded by Ferdinand 11. 
Eight years before in 1621, the year of the 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 151 

Grand Duke's death, Pope Paul V. died. He 
was succeeded by a feeble old man who lived 
and ruled as pontiff for two years. Upon his 
death the papacy fell to Cardinal Maffeo Bar- 
berini, who ruled as Urban VIII. This was the 
pope who ignored precedents, declaring that 
''the sentence of a living pope is worth more 
than the decrees of a hundred dead ones. ' ' He 
refused to take counsel with the Sacred Col- 
lege, saying that he ''knew better than all the 
cardinals put together." He revoked the res- 
olution of the Romans never again to erect a 
monument to a pope during his lifetime, as- 
serting that "such a resolution could not apply 
to a Pope like himself." He nuade some con- 
siderable display of an interest in poetry and 
science and had for years shown the warmest 
friendship for Galileo. It was therefore ex- 
pected that the Pope would present no ob- 
stacles to the new publication. 

The chief censor of the press was Father 
Riccardi at Rome, and the faithful Castelli, 
assured Galileo that Riccardi was favorable to 
the plan. Castelli further informed him of 
a conversation between the Pope and Thomas 
Campanella who had been brought from Spain 
to Rome by the Pope himself and had told the 
Pope at an audience that he had been trying 



152 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

to convert some German nobles to the Catholic 
faith, and had found them favorably disposed, 
but when they heard of the prohibition of the 
Copernican system, they became deaf to all 
further arguments. To this Urban had re- 
plied ^^It never was our intention ; and if it had 
depended upon us, that decree would not have 
been passed.'' It should be noticed, however, 
that in the struggle of 1616 the Pope, then a 
cardinal, did nothing for the cause of Coper- 
nicus. 

Galileo was convinced that his best policy 
was to proceed to Eome, and he arrived there 
on the third of May, 1630, with the manuscript 
of the dialogues ready for submission. Of a 
long audience which he had immediately with 
the Pope, he writes: ^*His Holiness has begun 
to regard my affairs in a way that permits me 
to hope for a favorable result." Eiccardi, the 
chief censor, justified the hope raised by Cas- 
telli's report, but did not fail to perceive after 
looking through the manuscript, that Galileo 
had not kept strictly within the limits of the 
merely hypothetical treatment of Copernicus 
prescribed by the inquisition. He set himself, 
therefore, in the dscharge of his official duty 
and in the interest of Galileo, to have these 
parts altered to the hypothetical standpoint. 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 153 

This task he intrusted to Father Visconti, pro- 
fessor of mathematics, who made what were 
considered the necessary alterations and finally- 
approved the revised work. In June Galileo 
persuaded Eiccardi to forego his wish to read 
the book again himself and issue immediately 
the permission of its printing in Rome. Ric- 
cardi had imposed only one condition — after 
the index and dedication were prepared it 
should be again submitted to him before being 
sent to the press. 

It was expected that the book would be pub- 
lished in Rome in the autumn in the name of 
the liberal society, Accademia dei Lincei, and 
was to be seen through the press by its presi- 
dent, Prince Cesi, an enthusiastic patron of all 
scientific enterprises. It was a great disaster 
for Galileo that Prince Cesi was seized with a 
fever in August and died after a few days ill- 
ness. The society, which had been held to- 
gether by him immediately began to dissolve. 
Robbed of his most powerful protector Ga- 
lileo's enemies renewed their activities and in 
less than a month after the Prince's death, 
Castelli urged Galileo *'for many most weighty 
reasons which he did not just then wish to 
commit to paper, to have the work printed in 
Florence, and as soon as possible.'' Castelli also 



154 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

informed him that Father Visconti wished the 
book to see the light and has assured him that 
there would be no objection to the printing at 
Florence. Galileo immediately applied to the 
Inquisitor-General of the city, to the Inspector- 
General, and to the political authorities for 
permission, which was granted without hesi- 
tation. 

The only thing remaining was to secure the 
final permission of the Roman censor, Riccardi. 
This was promptly refused on the ground that 
the manuscript had not been submitted for 
final revision. Riccardi demanded that it be 
sent to Rome to undergo this final censorship, 
after which it could be printed at Florence or 
anywhere else. Carrier service between Flor- 
ence and Rome had been rendered so unre- 
liable by the plague, that Galileo was afraid 
to intrust his entire manuscript and finally per- 
suaded Riccardi to be satisfied with the final 
revison of the preface and conclusion, and to 
appoint, for the revision of the rest of the 
manuscript, some representative in Florence. 
This appointment fell to Father Stephani, Coun- 
sel to the Inquisition at Florence. This eccle- 
siastic diligently performed his task and it is 
reported that he was moved to tears at some 
passages by the humility and reverent obe- 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 155 

dience to the Church displayed by the author. 
After making a few changes, he declared that 
the author should be begged to publish rather 
than have obstaclesi placed in his way. 

Riccardi thought otherwise. He had kept 
the preface and conclusion for months, per- 
sistently failing to fulfil his promise to return 
them. Galileo, convinced that no further dif- 
ficulty could be raised, had already begun the 
printing at Florence, when Riccardi suddenly 
raised the point that in the original agreement 
the book was to be published in Rome. "With 
this new objection, Galileo began to lose both 
hope and patience. In a letter to Cioli, he com- 
plained that Riccardi is apparently determined 
*'to delay and spin out everything with empty 
words, which it is not easy to put up with.'* 
The influence of the Grand Duke Ferdinand IT. 
was invoked, and Riccardi was induced to leave 
the final examination of the work to the In- 
quisitor at Florence, who would then decide 
the question of publication. Riccardi wrote a 
letter of instructions which should govern the 
Inquisitor in his examination of the manu- 
script, the chief item of which was that the 
truth of the Copernican system was never to be 
conceded, but always made to appear as a mere 
hypothesis. 



156 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

After a further tiresome wait Eiccardi finally 
returned the preface and conclusion and the 
great book appeared in February of 1632. It 
was enthusiastically applauded by all inde- 
pendent scholars. They properly appraised the 
thin hypothetical disguise and Professor White 
says '^The pious preface was laughed at from 
one end of Europe to the other." The main 
argument of this preface was to the effect that 
the book itself would show to the non-Italian 
world that the condemnation of Copernicus in 
1616 was not in any way due to Roman igno- 
rance of Copernican ideas. This argument be- 
ing received by scholars throughout Europe as 
a hugh joke caused the Church to suspect that 
it had been outwitted by the author. The 
Jesuits were especially bitter because it ap- 
peared to them that Galileo was usurping their 
claim to be the educators of Europe. A dili- 
gent search was prosecuted in every direction 
for some means of attacking the author. 

The first attack was made because of three 
dolphins which adorned the title-page of the 
book, and were charged to have some heretical 
significance. It turned out, however, that this 
was a sort of trademark of the publisher, 
Landini, and appeared in all his books. A 
really formidable weapon was used when Ga- 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 157 

lileo's foes succeeded in persuading Pope 
Urban that he himself was meant by Simpli- 
cius and that this was one way of calling him 
a simpleton. If the Pope had been less of an 
egotist, he would probably have laughed at 
this ridiculous idea instead of believing it. Al- 
though this personal motive of the Pope figured 
in his antagonism to Galileo, it was overshad- 
owed by the feeling that the Dialogues was a 
work that menaced the foundations of the 
Church. 

The first blow was struck when the pub- 
lisher, Landini at Florence, was forbidden the 
further sale of the book. This was followed 
by a special commission appointed by the Pope 
to investigate the whole affair. Landini was 
then further ordered to send all the copies in 
stock to Rome, but replied that all the copies 
had been delivered to the purchasers. Galileo 
was clearly in danger. When the Grand Duke's 
ambassador, Nicolini, following his instruc- 
tions from the Duke, went into the Vatican to 
intercede for Galileo, the Pope bluntly told 
him: *'Your Galileo has ventured to meddle 
with things that he ought not, and with the most 
important and dangerous subject that can be 
stirred up in these days. ' ' 



158 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

Fruitless efforts were made by the friends 
of Galileo to check the general movement for 
an inquisition trial for Galileo and it was 
equally in vain that the always faithful Cas- 
telli insisted *' Nothing can be done now to 
hinder the earth from revolving/' The chief 
difficulty that confronted Galileo's enemies 
was that the book had been submitted to all 
the proper authorities and had received all the 
necessary permissions, so that responsibility 
for its publication seemed to lie with the au- 
thorities and the censors, and Riccardi and Vis- 
conti at Rome were dismissed with disgrace, 
and Castelli was banished for three years from 
the papal presence. 

The appointed commission, however, succeed- 
ed, evidently to its own great surprise, in jfind- 
ing an effective weapon ready to its hand. In 
investigating the proceedings of February 26, 
1616, it discovered an unsigned note which no 
one appears to have known to have been any 
part of the legal documents of that occasion. 
Von Gebler and many other eminent author- 
ities seem to have the best of the case when 
they argue that this note had been interpolated 
into the proceedings by Galileo's opponents of 
that period. Galileo, himself, strenuously in- 
sisted and evidently quite sincerely that he had 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 159 

never been informed of the existence of such an 
order, and it is reasonably evident that the or- 
der was not adopted or communicated to him. 
The commission, however, insisted that both 
these contentions were wrong, that the inqui- 
sition of 1616 had adopted and communicated 
to Galileo the order, which reads as follows : 

*'To relinquish altogether the said opinion 
that the sun is the center of the world and im- 
movable, and that the earth moves ; nor hence- 
forth to hold, teach, or defend it in any way 
whatsoever, verbally or in writing, otherwise 
proceedings would be taken against him by the 
Holy Office, which injunction the said Galileo 
acquiesced in and promised to obey." 

This order, were it genuine, would mean that 
Galileo was not allowed to present Copernican 
ideas even as suppositions. It is flatly in con- 
flict with the letter given to Galileo at the time 
by Cardinal Bellarmine and is contradicted by 
the fact that Galileo always assumed himself 
to be at perfect liberty to adopt the hypo- 
thetical method and certainly the censor could 
have known nothing of this remarkable note. 
Whoever managed to interpolate it into the 
proceedings of 1616 worked against Galileo 
more effectively than they could have dreamed, 



160 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

for it was the grand cause of or at least the 
excuse for Galileo's undoing in 1633. 

Galileo was ordered to appear in Rome by 
a papal mandate of November 11. On the eigh- 
teenth of December the Father Inquisitor at 
Florence, reported to Rome that Galileo was 
seriously ill in bed and sent with the informa- 
tion a signed statement of three reliable phy- 
sicians that the least aggravation, such as 
would be caused by traveling, might be dan- 
gerous to life. At this time Galileo was within 
a few months of seventy years. The Roman 
reply to this came two days later and was a 
threat that if Galileo did not immediately ap- 
pear the Holy Congregation would send its own 
physician upon whose consent he would be 
brought to Rome in irons. It was added that 
the papal commissioner and the physician 
would travel at Galileo's expense. The help- 
lessness of the Italian rulers before the power 
of the hierarchy is seen in the utter inability 
of the Grand Duke to protect his philosopher 
from these extreme measures. Therefore, on 
the twentieth of January, 1633, with the plague 
everywhere raging, the feeble old man was car- 
ried in a litter to Rome. 

The long and dreary trial, reaching into the 
summer, found the aged astronomer so com- 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 161 

pletely exhausted that he begged his judges to 
have pity on his physical condition. Pity, 
however, had little place in their scheme of 
things. At this time Galileo was a prisoner, 
but it will probably never be possible definitely 
to decide whether he was kept in some apart- 
ment of the Vatican or consigned to the dun- 
geons of the inquisition. Von Gebler cautiously 
says that '4t may perhaps be concluded that 
he was never thrown into the dungeons of the 
inquisition." The charge that he was submit- 
ted to torture must be dismissed, unless we 
take our definition of torture from Julius 
Clarius: ''Know then there are five degrees of 
torture; first, the threat of the rack; second, 
being taken into the torture chamber; third, 
being undressed and bound; fourth, being laid 
upon the rack; fifth, turning the rack." In 
the sense of this definition it might be argued 
that Galileo was submitted to torture in the 
first degree. What really happened was that 
he was threatened with torture, and had he 
failed to comply with all the demands of his 
judges, would have been actually tortured. On 
Wednesday, June 22, 1633, in the large hall 
of the Dominican Convent of St. Maria sopra la 
Minerva, in the presence of his judges and a 
large gathering of cardinals and prelates of 



162 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

the Holy Congregation, Galileo had read to him 
the following sentence, which will be an im- 
portant historical document to the end of time : 

'^We, Gasparo del titolo di S. Croce in Gieru- 
salemme Borgia ; 

Fra Felice Centino del titolo di S. Anastasia, 
detto d'Ascoli; 

Guido del titolo di S. Maria del Popolo Benti- 
vogilo ; 

Fra Desiderio Scaglia del titolo di S. Carlo 
detto di Cremona; 

Fra Antonio Barberino detto di S. Onofrio ; 

Laudivio Zacchia del titolo di S. Pietro in 
Vincola detto di S. Sisto ; 

Berlingero del titolo di S. Agostino, Gessi ; 

Fabricio del titolo di S. Lorenzo in pane e 
perna, Verospi, chiamato Prete ; 

Francesco di S. Lorenzo in Damaso Barber- 
ino, e; 

Martio di S. Maria Nnova Ginetti Diaconi ; 

by the grace of God, cardinals of the Holy 
Roman Church, Inquisitors General, by the 
Holy Apostolic see specially deputed, against 
heretical depravity throughout the whole 
Christian Republic. 

'^ Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vin- 
cenzo Galileo, Florentine, aged seventy years, 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 163 

were in the year 1615 denounced to this Holy 
Office for holding as true the false doctrine 
taught by many, that the sun is the centre of 
the world and immovable, and that the earth 
moves, and also with a diurnal motion ; for hav- 
ing disciples to whom you taught the same 
doctrine ; for holding correspondence with cer- 
tain mathematicians of Germany concerning 
the same for having printed certain letters, en- 
titled 'On the Solar Spots,' wherein you de- 
veloped the same doctrine as true ; and for re- 
plying to the objections from the Holy Scrip- 
tures, which from time to time were urged 
against it, by glossing the said Scriptures ac- 
cording to your own meaning: and whereas 
there was thereupon produced the copy of a 
document in the form of a letter, purporting to 
be written by you to one formerly your disci- 
ple, and in this divers propositions are set 
forth, following the hypothesis of Copernicus, 
which are contrary to the true sense and au- 
thority of Holy Scripture: 

''This Holy Tribunal being therefore desir- 
ous of proceeding against the disorder and 
mischief thence resulting, which went on in- 
creasing to the prejudice of the Holy Faith, by 
command of his Holiness and of the most emi- 
nent Lord Cardinals of this supreme and uni- 



164 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

versal inquisition, the two propositions of the 
stability of the sun and the motion of the earth 
were by the theological ^Qualifiers' qualified as 
follows : 

**The proposition that the sun is the centre 
of the world and does not move from its place 
is absurd and false philosophically and for- 
mally heretical, because it is expressly con- 
trary to the Holy Scripture. 

*'The proposition that the earth is not the 
centre of the world and immovable, but that 
it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is 
equally absurd and false philosophically, and 
theologically considered, at least erroneous in 
faith. 

'*But whereas it was desired at that time to 
deal leniently with you, it was decreed at the 
Holy Congregation held before his Holiness on 
the twenty-fifth of February, 1616, that his 
Eminence the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine 
should order you to abandon altogether the 
said false doctrine, and, in the event of your 
refusal, that an injunction should be imposed 
upon you by the Commissary of the Holy Of- 
fice, to give up the said doctrine, and not to 
teach it to others, nor to defend it, nor even dis- 
cuss it; and failing your acquiescense in this 
injunction, that you should be imprisoned. And 



TEIAL AND SENTENCE 165 

in execution of this decree, on the following 
day, at the Palace, and in the presence of his 
Eminence, the said Lord Cardinal Bellarmine, 
after being gently admonished by the said Lord 
Cardinal, the command was intimated to you 
by the Father Commissary of the Holy Office 
for the time before a notary and witnesses, 
that you were altogether to abandon the said 
false opinion, and not in future to defend or 
teach it in any way whatsoever, neither ver- 
bally nor in writing ; and upon your promising 
to obey you were dismissed. 

''And in order that a doctrine so pernicious 
might be wholly rooted out and not insinuate 
itself further to the grave prejudice of Cath- 
olic truth, a decree was issued by the Holy 
Congregation of the Index, prohibiting the 
books which treat of this doctrine, and declar- 
ing the doctrine itself to be false and wholly 
contrary to sacred and Divine Scripture. 

*'And whereas a book appeared here recent- 
ly, printed last year at Florence, the title of 
which shows that you were the author, this 
title being: 'Dialogue of Galileo Galilei on the 
Two Principal Systems of the World, the 
Ptolemanic and the Copernican'; and whereas 
the Holy Congregation was afterwards in- 
formed that through the publication of the 



166 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

said book, the false opinion of the motion of 
the earth and the stability of the sun was daily 
gaining ground ; the said book was taken into 
careful consideration, and in it there was dis- 
covered a patent violation of the aforesaid in- 
junction that had been imposed upon you, for 
in this book you have defended the said opin- 
ion previously condemned and to your face de- 
clared to be so, although in the said book you 
strive by various devices to produce the im- 
pression that you leave it undecided, and in 
express terms as probable; which, however, is 
a most grievous error, as an opinion can in no 
wise be probable which has been declared and 
defined to be contrary to Divine Scripture: 

^^ Therefore by our order you were cited be- 
fore this Holy Office, where, being examined 
upon your oath, you acknowledged the book 
to be written and published by you. You con- 
fessed that you began to write the said book 
about ten or twelve years ago, after the com- 
mand had been imposed upon you as above; 
that you requested license to print it without, 
however, intimating to those who granted you 
this license that you had been commanded not 
to hold, defend, or teach in any way whatever 
the doctrine in question. 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 167 

*'You likewise confessed that the writing of 
the said book is in various places drawn up in 
such a form that the readers might fancy that 
the arguments brought forward on the false 
side are rather calculated by their cogency to 
compel conviction than to be easy of refuta- 
tion; excusing yourself for having fallen into 
an error, as you alleged, so foreign to your in- 
tention, by the fact that you had written in 
dialogue, and by the natural complacency that 
every man feels in regard to his own subtleties, 
and in showing himself more clever than the 
generality of men, in devising, even on behalf 
of false propositions, ingenious and plausible 
arguments. 

'*And a suitable term having been assigned 
to you to prepare your defense, you produced 
a certificate in the handwriting of his Eminence 
the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine, procured by 
you, as you asserted, in order to defend your- 
self against the calumnies of your enemies, 
who gave out that you had abjured and had 
been punished by the Holy Office; in which 
certificate it is declared that you had not ab- 
jured and had not been punished, but merely 
that the declaration made by his Holiness and 
published by the Holy Congregation of the 
Index, had been announced to you, wherein it 



168 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

is declared that the doctrine of the motion of 
the earth and the stability of the sun is con- 
trary to the Holy Scriptures, and therefore can- 
not be defended or held. And as in this certifi- 
cate there is no mention of the two articles of 
the injunction, namely, the order not 'to teach' 
and 'in any way,' you represented that we 
ought to believe that in the course of fourteen 
or sixteen years you had lost all memory of 
them ; and that this was why you said nothing 
of the injunction when you requested permis- 
sion to print your book. And all this you 
urged not by way of excuse for your error, but 
that it might be set down to a vainglorious am- 
bition rather than to malice. But this certifi- 
cate produced by you in your defense has only 
aggravated your delinquency, since although it 
is there stated that the said opinion is contrary 
to Holy Scripture, you have nevertheless dared 
to discuss and defend it and to argue its prob- 
ability; nor does the license artfully and cun- 
ningly extorted by you avail you anything, 
since you did not notify the command imposed 
upon you. 

''And whereas it appeared to us that you 
had not stated the full truth with regard to 
your intention, we thought it necessary to sub- 
ject you to a rigorous examination, at which 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 169 

(without prejudice, however, to the matters 
confessed by you, and set forth as above, with 
regard to your said intention) you answered 
like a good Catholic. Therefore, having seen 
and maturely considered the merits of this, 
your cause, together with your confessions and 
excuses above mentioned, and all that ought 
justly to be seen and considered, we have ar- 
rived at the underwritten final sentence against 
you: 

** Invoking, therefore, the most holy name of 
our Lord Jesus Christ and of His most glo- 
rious Mother, and ever Virgin Mary, by this 
our final sentence, which sitting in judgment, 
with the counsel and advice of the Reverend 
Masters of sacred theology and Doctors of both 
Laws, our assessors, we deliver in these writ- 
ings, in the cause and causes presently before 
us between the magnificent Carlo Sinceri, Doc- 
tor of both Laws, Proctor Fiscal of this Holy 
Office, of the one part, and you Galileo Galilei, 
the defendant, here present, tried and con- 
fessed as above, of the other part — we say, 
pronounce, sentence, declare, that you, the said 
Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in 
process, and by you confessed as above, have 
rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy 
Office vehemently "suspected of heresy, namely, 



170 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

of having believed and held the doctrine — 
which is false and contrary to the sacred and 
divine Scriptures — that the sun is the centre of 
the world and does not move from east to 
west, and that the earth moves and is not the 
centre of the world ; and that an opinion may be 
held and defended as probable after it has been 
declared and defined to be contrary to Holy 
Scripture ; and that consequently you have in- 
curred all the censures and penalties imposed 
and promulgated in the sacred canons and 
other constitutions, general and particular, 
against such delinquents. From which we are 
content that you be absolved, provided that 
first, with a sincere heart, and unfeigned faith, 
you abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid er- 
rors and heresies, and every other error and 
heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic 
Roman Church in the form to be prescribed by 
us. 

''And in order that this your grave and per- 
nicious error and transgression may not remain 
altogether unpunished, and that you may be 
more cautious for the future, and an example 
to others, that they may abstain from similar 
delinquencies — we ordain that the book of the 
'Dialogues of Galileo Galilei' be prohibited by 
public edict. 



TRIAL AND SENTENCE 171 

''We condemn you to the formal prison of 
this Holy Office during our pleasure, and by 
way of salutory penance, we enjoin that for 
three years to come you repeat once a week 
the seven penitential psalms. 

''Reserving to ourselves full liberty to mod- 
erate, commute, or take off, in whole or in part, 
the aforesaid penalities and penance. 

"And so we say, pronounce, sentence, de- 
clare, ordain, condemn and reserve, in this and 
any other better way and form which we can 
and may lawfully employ. 

"So we, the undersigned cardinals pro- 
nounce. 

"F. Cardinalis de Asculo, 
G. Cardinalis Bentiuolus, 
Fr. Cardinalis de Cremona, 
Fr. Antonius Cardinalis S. Honuphrij, 
B. Cardinalis Gypsius, 
Fr. Cardinalis Verospius, 
M. Cardinalis Ginettus.'' 



CHAPTER X 

RECANTATION AND AFTER 

IT WILL be observed that three of the 
names preceding the sentence are missing 
from the signatures at its close. The opin- 
ion of scholars who have devoted themselves 
to the remarkable career of the Floren- 
tine astronomer is divided as to whether or not 
this signified their disagreement with its impo- 
sition. However that may be, the document 
will stand forever as the irrefutable evidence 
of one of the darkest blots on the annals of 
mankind. Immediately after the sentence was 
pronounced, the great astronomer, now thor- 
oughly cowed and broken, was compelled to 
kneel humbly before the whole assembly and 
make the following degrading recantation: 

''I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo 
Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, ar- 
raigned personally before this tribunal, and 
kneeling before you, most Eminent and Rev- 
erend Lord Cardinals, inquisitors general 
against heretical depravity throughout the 
whole Christian Republic, having before my 
eyes and touching with my hands, the Holy 
Gospels — swear that I have always believed, 

172 



RECANTATION AND AFTER 173 

do now believe, and by God's help will for the 
future believe, all that is held, preached, and 
taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic 
Roman Church. But whereas — after an injunc- 
tion had been judicially intimated to me by this 
Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether 
abandon the false opinion that the sun is the 
centre of the world and immovable, and that 
the earth is not the centre of the world, and 
moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or 
teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in 
writing, the said doctrine, and after it had 
been notified to me that the said doctrine was 
contrary to Holy Scripture — ^I wrote and 
printed a book in which I discuss this doctrine 
already condemned, and adduce arguments of 
great cogency in its favor, without presenting 
any solution of these ; and for this cause I have 
been pronounced by the Holy Office to be 
vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, 
of having held and believed that the sun is the 
centre of the world and immovable, and that 
the earth is not the centre and moves: 

*' Therefore, desiring to remove from the 
minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful 
Christians, this strong suspicion reasonably 
conceived against me, with sincere heart and 
unfeigned faith I abjure, curse and detest the 



174 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally 
every other error and sect whatsoever contrary 
to the said Holy Church; and I swear that in 
future I will never again say or assert, verbally 
or in writing, any thing that might furnish oc- 
casion for a similar suspicion regarding me ; but 
that should I know any heretic, or person sus- 
pected of heresy, I will denounce him to this 
Holy Office, or to the inquisitor and ordinary 
of the place where I may be. Further, I swear 
and promise to fulfill and observe in their in- 
tegrity all penances that have been, or that 
shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. 
And, in the event of my contravening (which 
God forbid!) any of these my promises, pro- 
testations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the 
pains and penalities imposed and promulgated 
in the sacred canons and other constitutions, 
general and particular, against such delin- 
quents. So help me God, and these His Holy 
Gospels, which I touch with my hands. 

'T, Galileo Galilei, have adjured, sworn, 
promised and bound myself as above; and in 
witness of the truth thereof I have with my 
own hand subscribed the present document of 
my abjuration, and recited it word for word at 
Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty- 
second day of June, 1633. 



EECANTATION AND AFTER 175 

**I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above 
with my own hand. ' ' 

It may be held that Galileo would be a still 
greater hero had he displayed the martyr cour- 
age of Bruno. It must be considered, how- 
ever, that his torture and death were in no way 
necessary to the ultimate triumph of science, 
and that it was in the following years of im- 
prisonment that he was able to give to the 
world vast researches in another monumental 
scientific book, '*The Dialogues of the Two 
New Sciences." 

Now that Galileo was effectually silenced, a 
host of priestly writers arose and undertook 
to show the world the absurdity of the new as- 
tronomy. Two of the most famous of these 
will serve as examples of the rest. Scipio 
Chiaramonti produced the following luminous 
arguments : 

''Animals, which move, have limbs and mus- 
cles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, there- 
fore it does not move. It is angels who make 
Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn around. If 
the earth revolves, it must also have an angel 
in the centre to set it in motion ; but only devils 
live there; it would therefore be a devil who 
would impart motion to the earth. 



176 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION . 

**The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all 
belong to one species — ^namely, that of stars. It 
seems, therefore, to be a grievious wrong to 
place the earth, which is a sink of impurity, 
among these heavenly bodies, which are pure 
and divine things." 

Chiaramonti was ably seconded by Polacco, 
who produced a book entitled Anticopernicus 
Catholicus, which contained the following 
gems: 

*'If we concede the motion of the earth, why 
is it that an arrow shot into the air falls back 
to the same spot, while the earth and all the 
things on it have in the meantime moved very 
rapidly toward the east? Who does not see 
that great confusion would result from this 
motion? 

''The Copemican theory of the earth's mo- 
tion is against the nature of the earth itself, 
because the earth is not only cold but contains 
in itself the principle of cold; but cold is op- 
posed to motion and even destroys it — as is 
evident in animals, which become motionless 
when they become cold. 

''Since it can certainly be gathered from 
Scripture that the heavens move above the 
earth, and since a circular motion requires 
something immovable around which to move, 



RECANTATION AND AFTER 177 
. the earth is at the centre of the 



universe.'* 



To the above collection of forensic jewels 
might be added an argument of the great theo- 
logian Fromundus, of the Cathedral of Ant- 
werp, in his book ''Ant-Aristarchus," produced 
before the trial. Fromundus argues that if the 
earth be revolving, as says Copernicus, ''build- 
ings on the earth itself would fly off with such 
a rapid motion that men would have to be pro- 
vided with claws like cats to enable them to 
hold fast to the earth's surface." 

While Galileo was unable to reply, other 
champions spoke. Conspicuous among these 
was Campanella, who wrote his ''Apology for 
Galileo," for which, along with other heresies, 
he seven times underwent torture. As yet the 
Church had not the slightest inkling that it had 
committed the most colossal blunder of all his- 
tory and continued its harshness against the 
overwhelmed philosopher. During Galileo's 
lifetime the truths he had established were 
carefully weeded from all Catholic colleges and 
universities in Europe. When, in a scientific 
book which appeared, he happened to be re- 
ferred to as renowned, the inquisition ordered 
the substitution of the word notorious. All ef- 
forts made by the friends of the astronomer for 



178 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

the suspension of the sentence of imprisonment 
were useless, and he spent the last years of his 
life a prisoner in his own villa at Arcetri. He 
was allowed to receive one visit from the Grand 
Duke, but pleaded in vain for the extension of 
the same privilege to his many friends, until 
he was too blind to see them and too deaf to 
hear their voices. Says Gebler, *'It was not 
until the old man was quite blind and hope- 
lessly ill, with one foot in the grave, that any 
human feeling was awakened for him at the 
Vatican.'' One of his last wishes, to be buried 
in the vault of his ancestors, was denied, and 
although money was contributed by his ad- 
mirers for a handsome monument, no monu- 
ment of any kind was permitted. Even the fu- 
neral sermon had to pass the censorship of the 
inquisition to see that there were no reflections 
on the behavior of that organization. 

The works of Galileo and Copernicus re- 
mained on the Index of prohibited books, and 
in 1765 the celebrated French astronomer, La- 
lande, tried in vain to have the ban removed. 
They were still on the Index published in 1819, 
but in 1820, a crisis developed as the result of 
the writing of a book by Canon Settele, Cath- 
olic professor of astronomy at Rome, in which 
the Copernican system was taken for granted, 



RECANTATION AND AFTER 179 

as was the custom by this time throughout the 
world. The Master of the Sacred Palace, An- 
fossi, holder of the position held in Galileo's 
time by Riccardi, refused permission to print 
the book unless it was changed to treat the the- 
ories of Copernicus as mere hypotheses. The 
Canon refused to make himself the laughing 
stock of the nineteenth century and the cardi- 
nals were afraid to declare themselves as be- 
lieving in a stationary earth, and so on the 
eleventh of September, 1822, the Church de- 
creed that, 'Hhe printing and publication of 
works treating of the motion of the earth and 
the stability of the sun, in accordance with the 
general opinion of modern astronomers, is per- 
mitted at Rome." The Church had at last ar- 
rived at the position reached by Galileo more 
than two hundred years before. 

Thirteen more years elapsed, hovewer, before 
the Church had the courage to acknowledge its 
error, and issue in 1835 in an edition of the In- 
dex which did not condemn works dealing 
with the double motion of the earth. It is not 
necessary to dignify with a reply the shameful 
and unscrupulous arguments which appear in 
Catholic periodicals that Galileo was not per- 
secuted for his scientific opinions, but because 
of his impertinence to the Church, etc. The 



180 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 



only reply necessary to the folly of such irre- 
sponsible writers is to be found in the recent 
works of prominent Catholic scholars, a fair 
example of whom is Professor Walsh of Ford- 
ham University, who in his book, *'The Popes 
and Science,'' which bears the imprimatur of 
Archbishop Farley, says: *' There is no doubt 
that Galileo was persecuted by the inquisition 
on account of his astronomical teachings. We 
would be the last to deny that this was a 
deplorable mistake made by persons in ecclesi- 
astical authority, who endeavored to make a 
Church tribunal the judge of scientific truth, 
a function altogether alien to its character 
which it was not competent to exercise." 

This position taken by Professor Walsh is 
paralleled by the modern historical scholars of 
the Church, and the reader may form his own 
opinion of the article which appeared in the 
February, 1915, issue of the Catholic magazine 
''Truth," which says, ''The accusation that 
Galileo was persecuted on account of his scien- 
tific views, is now admitted by every writer as 
untrue and unjust." 

The actual documents of the Galileo trial re- 
mained hidden from the world in the archives 
of the Vatican until Napoleon took possession 
of the papal city and, in 1811, ordered the 



RECANTATION AND AFTEE 181 

removal of the archives to Paris. The French 
State Librarian, Barbier, recognized the im- 
mense importance of the records of the trial, 
and with the approval of the Emperor ordered 
a French translation. This would undoubtedly 
have been accomplished had not Napoleon been 
banished to Elba. It is interesting to read of 
the many and strenuous efforts made by the 
Vatican to recover these documents. They were 
still in Paris when Louis XVIII sat on the 
throne of France. The papal representative, 
Marini, seeking to recover them at this date, 
was informed that the King was anxious to 
read them and had them in his cabinet. Two 
years later, in 1817, the influence of the power- 
ful Richelieu was invoked in vain. Eleven 
years after this the effort was still fruitless 
and when Count Daru wished to use the docu- 
ments in his work on astronomy, he was in- 
formed that they could not be found. 

It is now agreed that they had been delib- 
erately hidden and they remained in conceal- 
ment seventeen years longer. The plea of the 
French government to the papacy that the 
documents were not returned because they had 
been lost was made to prevent an open breach 
on the subject. A representative of the Pope 
was sent from one library to another with per- 



182 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

mission to search and the sure knowledge that 
he would not find. Louis Phillipe finally prom- 
ised to return them to Rome if they could be 
found on the express condition that Rome 
would publish them complete. This condition 
being agreed to they were mysteriously found, 
and Pope Pius IX. was able to restore them to 
the prefect of the Sacred Archives, Marino 
Marini. 

Then came a discreditable effort to escape 
the promise given to the French ruler. Marini 
made a publication entitled ^* Galileo and the 
Inquisition," supposed to meet the French con- 
dition. Von Gebler says it was really a collec- 
tion of *' disjointed extracts, arbitrary frag- 
ments, and in many instances nothing.'* The 
Galilean biographer, Alberi, and ten years 
later, Professor Cantor asked in vain to be 
allowed to consult the documents for work 
they had in hand. It was in 1877, nearly thirty 
years after their recovery from Paris, that Karl 
von Gebler was permitted free access to the 
documents in the Vatican and brought out a 
German translation at Stuttgart. About the 
same time, Epinois, who had been working for 
some time on the project, brought out another 
complete edition, and now the world possesses 
the actual facts of the greatest trial in his- 



EECANTATION AND AFTER 183 

tory, and knows what it may expect if ever 
again priests and prelates are permitted to 
become masters of society and dictators of the 
human mind. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE FUTURE 

THE chief value of the study of history is, 
that a knowledge of the past helps us to 
understand the present and, in a meas- 
ure, to anticipate the future. There is consider- 
able divergence of opinion as to the destinies of 
science and religion. There are many super- 
ficial thinkers who believe that the warfare be- 
longs almost exclusively to the past. They are 
of the opinion that the differences between the 
historic antagonists are incidental, and acci- 
dental, but not fundamental. These accidental 
distinctions being removed, harmonious rela- 
tions are expected to prevail. 

These complacent apostles of reconciliation 
have utterly failed to grasp the nature and 
foundation of the antagonism. The Christian 
Church, Protestant and Catholic, holds and 
must hold that it is the guardian of certain un- 
changeable truths, committed to it by the 
creator of the universe. These revealed truths 
are sacred and the idea of an investigation of 
their verity with the possible result of rejec- 
tion is intolerable. 

The attitude of science is and must be the ex- 
act opposite. Science does not and never can 

184 



THE FUTURE 185 

consent to the placing of any so-called truth 
beyond the reach of re-examination, and the 
very law of its being is that weight of evidence 
is the sole justification for positiveness of 
affirmation. 

The science of astronomy has rendered mag- 
nificent service to the cause of progress by 
completely overthrowing what were alleged 
for centuries to be revealed truths about the 
universe. The Church has always maintained 
that its sacred colleges, and especially its 
popes, had the advantage of divine co-operation 
and enlightenment. The history of astronomy 
has completely destroyed this claim. It is no 
longer possible for an intelligent man to be- 
lieve that an organization which for two hun- 
dred and nineteen years forbade the reading 
of books teaching the rotation of the earth on 
its axis and its revolution about the sun could 
have had, during that entire period, access to 
divine sources of knowledge. During that pe- 
riod, the double motion of the earth, now 
known to every schoolboy, was denounced in 
eleven bulls solemnly issued by eleven different 
infallible popes. 

Great as have been the services of astronomy 
in shaking the foundations of ecclesiastical au- 
thority, they are likely to be eclipsed when the 



186 SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 

real implications of the theory of evolution are 
thoroughly established in the general mind. 
Unfortunately for religion, science has not been 
satisfied with the investigation of stars, rocks, 
animals, and other visible and material 
phenomena. It has gradually assumed the 
right to turn its gaze in any direction, and has 
not hesitated to direct its searchlight upon, and 
apply its methods to, the phenomena of re- 
ligion. 

One of its most striking and reliable discov- 
eries is that every religion represents the in- 
tellectual condition of a certain people of a cer- 
tain period. What the modern religionist seeks 
to accomplish is to fasten upon the human 
mind forever the conclusions reached by the 
men of a certain age. When this is understood, 
as it will be when the evolutionary theory is 
generally assimilated, the death knell of the- 
ology will have sounded. 

To seek to impose upon the modern mind the 
petrified blunders of primitive men, is as hope- 
less a task as would be the administration of a 
great modern city by the regulations which 
prevailed two thousand years ago in a Syrian 
village. The theological concept and the evolu- 
tionary concept are irreconcilable enemies, and 



THE FUTURE 187 

either can only live in peace by the extermina- 
tion of the other. 

In a fair field with no favor there would not 
be the slightest doubt as to the outcome of the 
struggle. Indeed in such a field, it would have 
terminated long ago. Religion has been and is 
protected, because it has proved the most ef- 
fective of all instruments for the perpetuation 
of the subjection of the so-called lower classes. 
As George Burman Foster, Professor of Re- 
ligion in the University of Chicago, has well 
said, ** Rulers have ever availed themselves of 
religion as a mighty agency in keeping under 
their unruly subjects — an agency more effect- 
ive than brute force, since it aroused a less vio- 
lent reaction.'' In the same paragraph the 
Professor quotes a German who said, *'How are 
the people to be saved from the Social Demo- 
crats if they stop going to church?'* 

It has become the custom of religious con- 
ventions to bewail the irreligion of the pro- 
letariat, which is largely due to the clear per- 
ception of thousands of the most intelligent of 
the working class that the ecclesiastical forces 
have always been mustered against them. 
There is a marked disposition on the part of 
an increasing number of working men and 
working women to revolt against all oppres- 



188 SCIENCE AND SUPEESTITION 

sors, be they royal, or priestly, or economic. 
Kings have always been tenacious when their 
revenues were threatened; priests have hesi- 
tated at nothing when their tithes were in 
jeopardy, and the bourgeoisie presents an un- 
broken front when its profits are in danger, but 
all these forms of income represent the robbery 
of labor and are responsible for its tragic 
poverty. 

Unless all signs fail, we or our immediate 
successors shall behold a generation of working 
men and working women who will scorn to be 
oppressed and refuse to be longer cajoled by 
enemies who pretend to be friends. Their atti- 
tude toward their social oppressors has been 
anticipated by Swinburne : 

''We have done with the kisses that sting, 
With the thief's mouth red from the feast. 

With the blood on the hands of the king. 
And the lie on the lips of the priest.'* 



I 



I 



